Senate Republicans tell veterans ‘fight for a job on your own’

Jobless veterans suffer some more as Senate Republicans offer a blatantly political election-year snub to President Obama. While five GOP senators sided with the Democrats on the bill, Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama, who was a captain in the 1970s in the U.S. Army reserves, was key to blocking the vote. Sen. Tom ‘Dr. No’ Coburn, of Oklahoma, stayed true to his nickname, preferring to talk about the abstract idea of bringing down the debt rather than address the plight of jobless in the here and now.

The unemployment rate for Iraq and Afghanistan veterans currently stands at 10.9 percent, compared to the 8.1 percent for the rest of the country. By one estimate, that translates into more than 720,000 unemployed veterans nationwide, 220,000 which are veterans who have served since Sept. 11, 2001. For a party that controlled the White House when America launched these two wars, putting politics above putting our former service members back to work ranks as fairly dishonorable. Worse still, because Congress is likely to recess for the remainder of the election season, expect the bill to effectively die on the Senate floor.

The nearly $1 billion tab for the Veterans Jobs Corps Act would have been paid for during the course of five years through the collection of delinquent taxes. It would have paid for job training and would have provided positions on federal public lands for veterans.