Jim Bunning

By now, of course, you are all aware of Jim Bunning’s stand. Shorn of the need to hide his real opinions on matters of social policy by his decision to leave the Senate this year, he is exercising his right to block legislation he finds offensive. What kind of legislation would that be? That needed to extend unemployment benefits for workers who have been without work so long that their original benefits are expiring. The rest of the Senate, ex a few Republicans who feel the same way Bunning does, have agreed on the need to pass this particular act. It would bring hope and relief to several million households that otherwise would be faced with the horrible circumstances of total penury.

Bunning simply doesn’t care.

He is taking a stand on old fashioned principle: he believes, presumably honestly, that unemployment insurance encourages laziness. That it engenders malingering. That the unemployed choose to stay that way because they can get cash from the government. And that support should be withdrawn from them to force them to look more diligently for whatever work they can find.

Bunning is a latter day puritanical moralist driven by a set of beliefs that allow him to see idleness in the very fact of unemployment. To him there is no unemployment, only complacent and willful avoidance of work funded by the taxpayer.

Bunning’s ability to wrap himself in self-righteous moralizing protects him from feeling any empathy for the unemployed. On the contrary he sees himself, preacher like, as ‘saving’ the unemployed from their indigent ways. By punishing them and their families he feels the warm glow that infects all moralists: the unemployed should be glad that Bunning has their moral best interests at heart. By taking away their benefits he is forcing them to stand tall and take responsibility for their plight. In the long run, his logic goes, they will all thank him for taking a stand against the government’s attempt to undermine their inborn self sufficiency.

Lenin was like that too: his dictum, that sometimes you have to destroy in order to save, fits Bunning well. Clearly extremists with a self assured sense of right and wrong come in all political stripes. Bunning and Lenin: a dynamic duo.

Except of course that Bunning is here today and is our particular problem, whereas Lenin is a discredited psychopathic failure.

No amount of pleading from those with more sanity seems to shake Bunning’s fervor. Susan Collins spent time today on the Senate floor trying to get him to relent. A steady stream of Democrats have taken up the cause. The Republicans are split: Senator Kyl agreed with Bunning when he said, yesterday, that unemployment relief is a major cause of indolence, and that he could see why Bunning was making the stand he is.

Ostensibly the detail Bunning objects to that the legislation fails to meet the Senate’s ‘pay as you go’ rules. That is to say its cost is not being offset by reductions is spending elsewhere. Bunning, naturally, never applied the paygo rules to any tax cuts he has supported along the way, which exposes him to all sorts of accusations of hypocrisy. But we all know paygo is really not his major target. Social support for the unemployed is.

That this can linger on unresolved after days is astonishing. That a single senator can prevent millions of unemployed families from getting help is beyond astonishing. What is worse is the lack of outrage in the media and even in the White House.

Making matters worse are all the other items wrapped up in this legislation, one of which was a renewal of parts of the Medicare payment schedule. Because the law was not passed, that renewal did not take place, so, as of Monday morning, the reimbursement rates paid by Medicare on a range of services dropped by 21%. Naturally the American Medical Association rose up and pilloried Bunning. Well not really. They avoided pointing fingers at Bunning. Instead they took a shot at the entire Senate. Odd that: the AMA had a specific grievance and chose to go for a general target. The AMA showing its GOP sympathies perhaps?

Meanwhile Bunning has become something of a hero for the Tea Party crowd. He has become a fellow traveller for those who hate all things government and see scarcely hidden socialism in anything that smacks of welfare. This represents quite a dilemma for the Republicans in an election year. Which explains the strange silence from the GOP leadership – other than Kyl. As the GOP drifts ever farther away from its pragmatic roots and ever closer to a strange brew of Palinesque, Glenn Beck worshipping, anti-intellectual, anti-government, anti-community, anti-IRS, anti-Washington, fiscally reckless, Ayn Rand inspired libertarianism, it reveals great fissures within itself that even the Democrats cannot rival. And that is saying something.

The Republicans have already found it difficult to criticize the criminal who flew his plane into an IRS building – GOP leaders have said they ‘understand his anger’. Now they have to deal with Bunning’s folly and his attack on the unemployed.

It is no wonder we could not get more stimulus passed through Congress: these folks really hate America enough that they want it to fail so that they say they told us so.

Which reminds me of Lenin.

But I mentioned that already.

Extremists are all the same: dangerous, anti-social, and self-regarding.

Update:

Well that was fun. Tonight [Tuesday] the Senate finally managed to vote on the bill Bunning had held up. It passed on a straight up and down vote by 78 – 19.

This is flat out ridiculous.

Last week at about this time the Democrats told the Republicans that they would bring the bill to the floor for a straight up and down vote. The thinking was that it was so popular that it would pass with strong bipartisan support. The GOP leadership rejected the offer – so obsessed are they with their obstructionist play acting – and so the vote became subject to the usual filibuster prone rules that dog the Senate. In stepped Bunning to exercise that filibuster right, and as a consequence millions suffered.

The embarrassment was enough to force the Republican leadership to ‘look for a solution’, which turned out to be the up and down vote originally offered to them last week. And the bill passed with strong bipartisan support.

So what happened in the interim?

Bunning happened.

This tawdry episode captures in a small, but significant, way all that is wrong with our legislative processes. A single obstructionist can hold sway over the other 99 Senators. A minority party can dictate both the shape and the timing of legislation. And the stubborn adherence to anachronistic arcane Senate rules is more important to the Senate club members than the lives of regular Americans.

Not only is that sick. It isn’t democratic.