The session of Congress that gave out last week -- "adjourned" seems too dignified a term -- accomplished so little that one more failure seems barely worth noticing. But the Senate's refusal Thursday to consider a veterans' jobs bill from Sen. Patty Murray, D-Wash., is a particular disappointment.

If anybody has a claim to special attention from a Congress tightly focused on its own political interests, it's veterans who came back from deployment in Iraq or Afghanistan to find nowhere to deploy in America.

The proposal from Murray, chairman of the Senate Veterans' Affairs Committee, would have spent $1 billion over five years to create public jobs for veterans, especially on public lands. It would have been paid for by withholding passport renewals and Medicare provider payments from applicants with sizable income tax arrears, a more specific payment arrangement than Congress used to send the veterans to war.

The Senate's legislative process blocks action not only now, but in the post-election lame duck session that Washington hopes will provide a calmer, more productive approach. Instead, the veterans are likely kicked deep into next year.

"The number one issue I hear from Iraq and Afghanistan veterans is they want a job," said Murray after the vote. "They don't want to have to wait six or eight months. They're coming home now. Their suicide rate is high now."

Possibly this seems like a particularly good idea to us because, as Murray says, the Northwest has a lot of national parks, and a lot of unemployed veterans. And as Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., said after the vote, "The men and women who have stood up for us, serving us valiantly overseas, shouldn't come home to unemployment lines."

In the filibuster-ridden Senate, the vote to consider the bill needed 60 votes; the final vote was 58-40. In this bitterly divided session, to get even five Republican votes, as Murray's proposal did, makes it almost a landmark of bipartisanship. But as Murray noted, "As someone who's worked on veterans' issues a long time, they've always been above the partisan fray."

These days, that's not true of any issue. And it's hard to expect anything productive from this Congress, which allowed the farm bill to lapse without renewal -- it didn't even make it to the floor of the House -- for the first time since 1949, and just passed a continuing resolution to keep the government in business for another six months.

But this is no way to run a country -- and no way to treat the people who fought for it. If a more rational approach ever does surface in Congress, in the lame-duck session or whenever, unemployed veterans deserve to get its early consideration.