You may not see them out at lunch, in your office, or while you rush to work in the morning. They are the New Unemployed, the long-term jobless, whose numbers have reached historic levels during the Great Recession. They didn’t buy and sell derivative contracts on Wall Street; they didn’t securitize bad mortgages; they didn’t make rotten decisions to over-extend their financial firms. No, they just had the misfortune of living at the wrong time, in the midst of an epic crash. And now they’re being told that their jobs are permanently gone.

There’s a lot more that’s frozen in D.C. this week than the usual fallout from a blizzard. The brains of many Senate Republicans are on ice as well. The House passed a jobs bill in December, but the Senate is dawdling, and worse—threatening to pass bits and pieces, taking apart what should be a comprehensive approach to jobs and turning it into minced cabbage.