Examples of extreme, obstreperous partisanship in the U.S. Senate have become commonplace the past two years. But few are as symbolic of what’s gone wrong in the Senate as the cruel stunt Sen. Jim Bunning, a Kentucky Republican, is pulling now to get attention to his point of view.
He is single-handedly blocking approval of a $10 billion bill – and an interim 30-day measure – that would extend current payment levels to Medicare providers, continue health insurance and unemployment aid for hundreds of thousands of laid-off Americans workers, and keep funding going for 41 federal transportation projects and their workers around the country. Tennessee is among the states in which Mr. Bunning’s action would cause lost jobless and highway funds to harm 20,000 to 50,000 residents as of the Monday, March 1, cutoff.
When Mr. Bunning pulled the plug on funding for those benefits on Monday by barring unanimous consent for approval of an interim bill, he immediately cast the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans into fear and chaos. The Americans snubbed by the senators woke up Tuesday without congressional authority to extend their crucial assistance. And construction workers for the transportation projects found themselves furloughed, or laid-off without pay.
Mr. Bunning’s decision to put a hold on the interim legislation to extend current spending for those programs showed exactly where he stands in regard to the people hurt by his vote: He didn’t care where or how he dumped them, even after his objections to emergency funding for the bill had been duly noted on the Senate floor.
The senator’s ability to stall passage of the aid bill rests on the Senate procedure that allows individual senators a right to put a hold on legislation that can only be broken by a cloture vote. Senate rules require a filibuster-proof 60 votes to break a hold.
It’s not likely, to be sure, that other Republican senators would support Sen. Bunning’s move if his hold came to floor vote. Sen. Susan Collins, a moderate Maine Republican, chided Sen. Bunning on Tuesday morning for his hold. She said she spoke “on behalf of numerous members of the Republican caucus who have expressed concerns to me” about his hold. Regardless, it would take several days for Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to clear debate on the hold and secure a vote.
Contrary to Sen. Collins’ view, some of the Senate Republicans have suggested they would be happy to speak in behalf of Sen. Bunning’s point of view. But the Senate simply doesn’t have the time on its legislative calendar to drop discussion on other significant bills and spend days debating a bill that was considered passable by unanimous consent.
Sen. Bunning says he wants the Senate to use the ‘pay-go’ rule that Democrats reinstalled last year to require that any new spending legislation be offset by cuts in other areas of spending. Republicans had dropped the pay-as-you-go rule when they were the majority and the George W. Bush administration was running up $6 trillion in new deficits, but pay-go is generally desirable.
Democrats reasonably argue, however, that emergency funding is appropriate for the consent bill because the economic circumstances it addresses were not foreseen when the current budget was formulated.
In reality, Sen. Bunning’s motive for putting a hold on the bill does not derive from any personal stature or philosophically consistent position as a deficit hawk; he recklessly signed off on all the so-called “emergency” deficit spending of the Bush administration, including the years-long “emergency” funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rather, he just wants to throw a monkey wrench into the Senate’s proceedings to fuel more partisan controversy, even though that controversy makes him look like an irrational hypocrite.
Alas, that’s also symbolic of what the Republican Party of No has become: Some of its members will shoot the party in the foot nowadays just to draw attention to their blatant obstructionism. Those who do so actually paint themselves as the problem, and they don’t seem to mind how many innocent Americans they hurt in the process.