Bob Bixby, executive director of the Concord Coalition, an Arlington, Virginia, group that promotes balanced budgets, called the fight “odd” because the proposed aid is a small fraction of the $10 trillion in deficits the government is projected to run up over the next decade.

“Attacking that is not attacking the real deficit issue,” Bixby said. “Unemployment benefits seem to have been in the wrong place at the wrong time.”