Almost two days after the H.R. 3548 survived its first cloture vote, there has been no major movement on the bill that would extend unemployment insurance for Americans who have exhausted their benefits. Why? Republicans keep throwing up new procedural barriers.

After reaching a bipartisan agreement to include an amendment extending the first-time homebuyer's tax credit, Senate Republicans agreed today to drop their efforts to weigh down the legislation with controversial amendments regarding ACORN and the E-Verify program. In exchange, they've turned to a new form of obstruction: demanding a vote on two new controversial amendments. The first would speed up the expiration date for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (a non-starter for Democrats who point out that a sunset date for the bank bailouts is already written into law). The second is yet another attempt to change to the way the extension is funded, by using "unspent" stimulus money, rather than the federal unemployment surtax, which amounts to 0.2 percent tax on the initial $7,000 of employees' wages.

As we've discussed before, funding an extension through the surtax is a sound strategy. After all, unemployment benefits have been extended so frequently over the past 30 years, many businesses have already budgeted for it. And it's not exactly a hefty expense, costing employers, on average, an extra $14 per employee annually. The GOP opposition is nothing more than petty politics.

Until those details can be ironed out, the legislation will stay lodged in the upper chamber. And every day that it does, another 350 Illinois families will exhaust their benefits.