The Senate scattered to the four winds this afternoon, leaving unfinished work on a $9.2 billion bill to extend for one-month unemployment benefits. This will not make for a restful two-week recess for exhausted lawmakers as some of the benefits begin to run out April 5 – the day after Easter. Barring any kidnapped girls or celebrity deaths, I can just imagine cable network news directors, desperate for stories, fixating on the plight of furloughed Transportation Department workers or people who have, for the second time in two months, lost their unemployment benefits. Unfortunately for those folks, the Senate is not scheduled to reconvene until April 12 at which time Democrats expect to pass another extension that will apply the benefits retroactively.

Sound familiar? Yes, this is exactly what happened last month with Senator Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican. So why the repeat performance?

Republicans want the bill to be paid for. In the last week they’ve attached a version to the reconciliation amendments and tried straight passage of a substitute bill, both of which used stimulus funds to pay for it –Dems voted down both. Senator Tom Coburn, an Oklahoma Republican, is the main person objecting to the bill on the grounds that this is the fifth unpaid for bill Dems have passed this year and all this debt is mounting on his grandchildren. “The American people and the rest of the world understand that our debt and deficits are as much of an emergency as our unemployment rate,” Coburn said in a statement Friday. “The American people also understand the best unemployment benefit is a job.  An economy with as much debt as our simply can’t create jobs at the rate we need them.”