Jim Bunning partisans will say that the Kentucky junior senator's most recent headline-grabbing display of obstinate oafishness was really a principled stand. His lone vote — not once, but twice — to block the extension of unemployment and health benefits to unemployed Americans, a vote that also stalled road projects and furloughed those workers, was purportedly all about forcing the country to pay as it goes, even when it comes to extending safety nets to those feeling the worst pains of the worst recession in modern American history. (Question: Did he demand the same standard for bankrolling the wars?)
...Kentuckians — and the rest of the country he has now held hostage — must wait for the countdown clock to tick until Election Day in November for Mr. Bunning's return to private life, and even then there is no guarantee that the Bluegrass State will be better represented.
Democratic senatorial candidates Jack Conway and Daniel Mongiardo correctly condemned Mr. Bunning's heartless and senseless obstruction, but Republicans Trey Grayson and Rand Paul sounded like little Bunnings in the campaign oven as they praised his vote.
The Herald-Leader added this:
We've become accustomed to bizarre, egocentric behavior from Bunning. So it wasn't all that surprising when he single-handedly blocked an unemployment benefits extension for a million people, including 119,230 in Kentucky, whose benefits run out this year. About 14,000 Kentuckians will exhaust their benefits in two weeks without the extension.
...What is surprising is that Trey Grayson and Rand Paul, the leading Republicans to succeed Bunning, jumped on his one-man band wagon.
...Congress has reinstated the pay-as-you-go rules that produced a balanced budget in the Clinton years and must, as Bunning says, follow those rules to gain control of a runaway deficit. Unemployment benefits are a ridiculous place to start. Do Grayson and Paul really not understand that?
