Wednesday was a difficult day for The American Independent News Network, which is the larger entity that operates The Iowa Independent. Our chief executive and founder announced two of our sister sites would close and their content would be moved to The American Independent.
A recently introduced bill could have far-reaching impact on the U.S. sugar industry, including American Crystal Sugar, a farmer-owned cooperative that locked out 1,300 Midwest workers on Aug. 1.
The chairman for Herman Cain’s Iowa effort says the campaign “relied more on the word of farmers than Washington regulators” in deciding to run an ad containing claims the Environmental Protection Agency says are false.
The Iowa Senate will remain under the control of a slim 26-25 Democratic majority when it reconvenes in January 2012.
Democrats in the U.S. Senate tried to pass a 30-day extension of unemployment benefits (among other things) Friday morning, designed to allow the upper-chamber more time to crunch the details of a longer-term fix.
It didn’t happen.
Sen. Jim Bunning, R-Ky., objected to the request for unanimous consent, insisting that the extension be paid for. The Hall-of-Fame baseball pitcher, who’s retiring at the end of this year, has proposed an amendment to cover the $10 billion tab using unspent stimulus funds, though he says he’s in favor of other offsets as well.
“Everybody in this chamber wants to extend unemployment benefits,” Bunning said on the Senate floor. “[But] if we can’t find a $10 billion somewhere for a bill that everybody in this body supports, we will never pay for anything.”
It’s not the first time. Thursday, a group of Senate lawmakers remained in the chamber until nearly midnight as the Democrats tried to get an agreement on the 30-day UI extension. Bunning didn’t budge.
The impasse means that those who exhaust their UI benefits after Sunday’s filing deadline will have to wait for Congress to pass a longer-term extension — a bill Senate leaders plan to take up early next week.
It won’t be an immediate vote. Although party leaders have reached an agreement to proceed to the bill (meaning Democrats won’t have to slog through cloture procedures just to bring the bill to the floor), the final vote will likely require a cloture vote due to Bunning’s objections.
Meanwhile, unemployed workers will slowly be losing their benefits, with roughly 1.2 million Americans — including 76,000 Iowans — projected to drop from the rolls in March alone without congressional action.
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