With unemployment hovering around 10%, affecting the job prospects of both the young and the old alike, things haven’t been looking too good for the American worker. As a response, Congress has put together a jobs bill to extend unemployment benefits — and other components of the social safety net. However, after a disheartening loss in the Senate yesterday the bill was sent back to the drawing board.

One Senator, Republican Orrin Hatch of Utah, has decided to take this opportunity to add an amendment making drug tests mandatory for anyone receiving welfare or unemployment benefits. So in order to receive federal benefits, you would have to pee in a cup. According to Hatch, “This amendment is a way to help people get off of drugs to become productive and healthy members of society, while ensuring that valuable taxpayer dollars aren’t wasted”.

Wasted? Like the money we’ll be using to drug test the 9.8 million Americans currently on unemployment? As well as the 4.4 million families currently on welfare? But, hey, we wouldn’t want anyone having fun while they’re down and out, now do we.

Hatch went on to add, “Too many Americans are locked into a life of a dangerous dependency not only on drugs, but the federal assistance that serves to enable their addiction.” Aha! The problem here isn’t the drugs, but the addiction we have to federal assistance! Damn government checks feel sooo good! Too good, perhaps.

Fortunately, this amendment hasn’t passed yet. And even if it does, it will have to jump a few constitutional hurdles before it could become law, as courts in Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and Tennessee have already found mandatory drug tests for government benefits to be unconstitutional.