Elizabeth Letchworth

Daniel Webster's dictionary defines the word "emergency" like this: "crisis, accident, unforeseen climax, clutch."

Yet the Democrats controlling our Congress have used this word "emergency" to bypass having to pay the tab for the extension of unemployment benefits and to fund our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. For anyone to have not seen the need to fund the federal unemployment benefits, or for anyone to say that the need to do so was unforeseen, must have been living underneath a rock over the past several years. The same is true for the funds needed to pay for our war efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Once again, it's not an accident that the Department of Defense needs the money. If anything, it was completely foreseen and actually talked about last year when Congress funded these wars. They admitted last year that the funding they were passing at the time was only the first part of a several part initiative needed to get the job done. Consequently, this is hardly unforeseen.

Nevertheless, Congress has used these "magic words" to skirt its responsibility when it comes to paying the price associated with these two legislative endeavors. Just to be fair, the GOP Congress and former President Bush used these same "magic words" to get around most of the funding of the Iraq war and other initiatives during their control of Congress. So this idea of invoking "emergency" isn't new to the current administration or the current democratically controlled Congress.

In the Senate this week, the dictionary must have been passed around the chamber because more than enough U.S. senators voted against the federal unemployment insurance extension bill. All GOP senators plus one Democratic senator voted against the five-month unemployment extension bill because it was not paid for, because the $34 billion price tag was being added to our exploding $13 trillion debt. The vote was 58-38.

After the failed vote in the Senate, the GOP Leader, Sen. McConnell, R-Kentucky, asked the Senate to agree to the same unemployment extension language, only this time the price of $34 billion would be paid for out of the unspent stimulus money sitting in our treasury. This was objected to by the Senate Democrats. The Senate did have some success this week: it confirmed Gen. David Petreaus by a unanimous vote of 99-0. The Senate adjourned for the week early, on Wednesday evening, in order to attend memorial and funeral services for the late Sen. Robert C. Byrd, D-W. Va., who died early Monday morning. He was the longest serving senator in the history of our country.

On the other side of the Capitol, the House spent the week trying to get the votes to pass the financial reform conference report. They did finally pass the bill by a vote of 237 to 192 after three days of renegotiating the text. Behind the scenes, Speaker Nancy Pelosi was working to get the votes for the war supplemental and the unemployment benefits bill. Both of these bills use the magic words ..."emergency designation"... so as to avoid having Congress find an offset for the price associated with them.

In order for Speaker Pelosi to garner enough votes to pass the war supplemental, she had to break up the major provisions of the bill into tricky divisions and ultimately bypassed a final vote. The war funding was requested by the president in early spring with a price of $33 billion. The Senate porked-up the bill totaling approximately $60 billion. Now the House passed the bill with a price of $80 billion. The vote was 215-210 to pass the rule governing how the House considered the bill and this was deemed the passage vote on the bill.