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Congress has extended unemployment benefits for more than two million jobseekers in 49 states, but not Florida.

Congress didn’t snub Florida; the state legislature did. During regular session in March, state lawmakers voted to put a June 5th, cutoff date on Floridians receiving extended benefits. The legislature then could have changed the deadline when they met in Special Session Tuesday. But Speaker Larry Cretul says he didn’t know Congress was going to extended benefits, even though the issue has been on a fast track for passage for more than a week.

Cretul: They passed it out after we adjourned.

Whitney: But you saw it coming. You could have done something with that deadline.

Cretul: Well, we could have but when we begin to think about what could and couldn’t happen, in Washington in particular, who knows?

Whitney: It seemed like a lot of people knew.

Cretul: Well maybe they did, but the reality is that we’ll deal with it when we come back in Special session.

That special session is tentatively scheduled for September; meanwhile 200-thousand Floridians have exhausted their benefits and an extra 5-thousand a day falling off the unemployment rolls. Even though Cretul says the Legislature didn’t act because they didn’t know what Congress would do, but it didn’t stop them from balancing the state budget with billions of federal aid that still hasn’t arrived.