There’s a cloture vote scheduled today on the tax extenders bill in the Senate. It doesn’t look like it’ll pass. Bernie Sanders couldn’t get a repeal of fossil fuel subsidies into it last night to help pay for it, so the usual suspects are choking on the cost. And Senators on the Democratic side are already talking about how they’ll change the bill, literally nickel-and-diming the jobless by cutting the $25 boost to unemployment insurance checks, and pushing back the 19-month extension of the “doc fix” to 12 months. That’s almost certain to come into play, because as Kagro X said, “we all know nothing promotes cooperation on cloture like signaling ahead of time what concessions you’re willing to make when it fails.”

With all the uncertainty on the scope of the extenders bill, David Obey has decided to take a hostage. Basically, there will be no war funding until the extenders bill gets resolved.

Obey has been central to the fight over education aid and, in an interview, drew a direct link between war funding and progress on domestic priorities.

He said he would withhold action on the war funds until there was some resolution on a major economic relief bill extending jobless benefits for the long-term unemployed and popular tax breaks for individuals and businesses [...]

“I want to wait until the extenders bill is resolved,” Obey told POLITICO of the separate war funding measure. “All I can do is sit and wait until reality strikes home, and then maybe we’ll get somewhere.”

That war funding bill may include $23 billion to save the jobs of up to 300,000 teachers facing layoffs. But Obey wants to see what else he may need to add after the extenders bill gets hacked up. Obey’s also upset that he hasn’t received an official budget request for the education jobs money.

Adding to this is the anxiety over the trajectory of the war effort in Afghanistan, described by Steny Hoyer yesterday. This seems to be the week where members of Congress got slapped in the face by reality, and the prospect of no progress in Afghanistan is hitting them hard.

“I think there’s a significant concern about Afghanistan,” Hoyer said about his fellow Democrats in the House. “I think we all share that concern.” [...]

“I think that, clearly, the president enjoyed broad, bipartisan support for the plan that he proposed in dealing with the counterinsurgency, and to stabilizing Afghanistan and to then having a plan to phase out our involvement and turn that responsibility over to the Afghan government and the Afghan people,” Hoyer said in a press conference Tuesday. “Clearly, as is usually the case, it hasn’t gone as smoothly as I think we would have liked, or as was contemplated.”

But the bigger issue is the unsettled stimulus spending. After today’s cloture vote, I don’t think we’ll be much closer to a solution.

UPDATE: Voting is happening right now on cloture for the tax extenders bill, and it’s going to lose. Scott Brown, Collins, Snowe and even Ben Nelson all voted no. I predict 57-43, short of 60. So now out comes the $25 for UI and half the doc fix.

UPDATE II: Wow, it lost 45-52. I caught that Menendez voted against it, and I’d gather around 10 Senate Dems joined him. What a miserable outcome.

UPDATE III: Via Mitchell Hirsh, that vote was actually a motion to “waive the Budget Act,” which is a vote to basically waive paygo. Much of the extenders bill is emergency spending, so you need to waive paygo. Ben Nelson has said that he doesn’t consider anything but flood insurance to be an “emergency,” so he wants close to $80 billion in offsets. Of course he didn’t vote for cutting fossil fuel subsidies, the Sanders amendment, which would have brought in $35 billion.