In the wee hours of Thursday morning, the Missouri House failed to approve a motion to override Gov. Jay Nixon's veto of a bill changing state unemployment procedures sponsored by Sen. Mike Kehoe.
The House took up the issue after the Senate approved an override hours earlier on Wednesday.
Kehoe, R-Jefferson City, argued the state's small businesses would benefit from the bill.
"Due to the economic downturn in 2008 and 09, Missouri's Unemployment Trust Fund ran out of money and the state of Missouri had to go borrow from the federal government," Kehoe reminded colleagues. "Senate Bill 673 would have put a process in place that would, possibly, avoid that problem in the future."
He noted the bill, passed last spring, encouraged officials to consider bonding as a way to pay those unemployment benefits, tied the number of weeks of allowable state benefits to the state's unemployment percentage and raised the cap on employers' contributions to the fund.
"The theory there was," Kehoe explained, "when times are good, it's easier for small businesses to pay into that unemployment trust fund, versus when times are bad - and these small businesses are getting these huge assessments, up to $63 an employee right now in the state of Missouri.
"It's very tough for businesses to overcome those kinds of costs."
But Nixon's two-page veto message said the changes amounted to a benefits reduction "in a system that is hardly lucrative when measured against the rest of the country."
Sen. Scott Sifton, D-Affton, told Kehoe he'd vote against the override effort, just as he'd voted against the original bill earlier this year.
"In my view, we are shortening benefits for many people in a way that may very well compound the damage the next time we have a major (economic) downturn," Sifton said.
But, Kehoe reminded colleagues, "The federal unemployment still is in place - and that's the majority of the benefits."
Senators sent the bill to the House after overriding Nixon's veto on a 25-7 vote. The House then failed to override on a 107-53 vote, two votes shy of the necessary two-thirds majority.