The Veterans Job Corps Act (S. 3457), is a bill sponsored by Bill Nelson, a Democratic Senator from Florida. It is currently being considered in the Senate, though has yet to pass the House. The bill is a priority for the Obama Administration, and the President has indicated that he is eager to sign the bill into law as soon as possible.

A recent report from the Department of Labor indicated that War on Terror-era veterans still have a 10.9 percent unemployment rate – markedly higher than the 8.3 percent unemployment rate nationwide, and also higher than the 6.6 percent unemployment rate among veterans generally.

Among other provisions, the Veterans Job Corps Act would allocate $1 billion over 5 years to hire veterans, largely doing maintenance work in the National Park System. The law is, in part, modeled on the Civilian Conservation Corps of the Great Depression era, which was a federal program to put idled workers back into the labor force and provide them some money so the economy wouldn’ t go into total collapse.

However, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY), initiated a filibuster of the bill. The lone dissent was Senator Rand Paul, a Republican representing the Commonwealth of Kentucky. He took the podium and called on the Senate to attach an amendment to the bill cutting off aid to Pakistan unless it frees a jailed Pakistani physician named Shakil Afridi. Afridi worked closely with the CIA running an immunization program in Pakistan – but his real work was collecting DNA samples that helped us to locate Osama Bin Laden. Afridi was tried and convicted for treason – not for helping the U.S. find Bin Laden, but for connections with another radical Islamic group, Lakshar-e-Islam.

As filibusters go, this one wasn’t much. Senator Paul spoke for only 15 minutes. The Senate soon held a cloture vote to break the filibuster, which passed overwhelmingly with votes from both parties. The bill is ready for an up or down vote.

Nevertheless, Democrats are trying to develop the meme that a Republican filibuster – already over and done with – is holding up the bill. Indeed, Politico fell for it, hook, line and sinker. They ran a story already blaming the hold-up on a single Republican, without mentioning any of the significant objections and criticisms of the bill.

Republicans Objecting
Senator Tom Coburn, a Republican from Oklahoma. Coburn has criticized the bill, though, for two reasons: He does not want a law that excludes older unemployed veterans from consideration. He also argued that the program is redundant, expensive, and at any rate, unlikely to pass muster with more fiscally conservative Republicans in the House of Representatives.

“We already have six veterans’ job programs,” said Coburn, according to reporting from the Army Times. “Not one of them has a metric on it to see if it is working. There has not been one hearing to see what the jobs program that we are running now are doing.”