Sen. Bunning has a point
Published 6:39 pm Tuesday, March 2, 2010
For all the bashing renegade Sen. Jim Bunning has taken the past few days from Democrats, fellow Republicans and pundits, you’d think he was demanding something radical.
Yes, his one-man blockade against a $10 billion package to extend unemployment benefits, health insurance subsidies for the jobless, highway programs and Medicare payments to doctors obstructed the democratic process, and was possible only because of the Senate’s arcane procedural rules. But his demand hardly seemed unreasonable: offset the cost with cuts elsewhere. He suggested taking it from unspent stimulus money, an alternative Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid rejected.
This is a Senate that less than a month ago approved pay-as-you-go rules that require Congress to pay for new discretionary spending rather than just adding to the nation’s already unfathomable debt.
“When 100 senators are for a bill, and we can’t find $10 billion to pay for it, there’s something the matter, seriously the matter, with this body,” Bunning said.
Easy for him to say, most of his Republican colleagues implied, he’s not running for re-election.
Washington Sen. Patty Murray, a member of the Senate Democratic leadership, blasted Bunning during a floor speech Tuesday, before Bunning finally relented.
“Today we have a clear cut example to show the American people just what’s wrong with Washington, D.C.,” Murray said. “That is because today one single Republican senator is standing in the way of the unemployment benefits of 400,000 Americans.”
Maybe, just maybe, Congress’ lack of fiscal discipline is also part of Washington’s public relations problem.
Granted, Bunning’s protest carried its own measure of hypocrisy, as Reid pointed out the other day. Where were Bunning’s objections, Reid asked on the floor, when the nation went to war in Iraq on the national credit card?
But it shined a needed spotlight on Congress’ inability to exercise self-restraint. It followed the Senate’s refusal to impose fiscal discipline on itself by rejecting the creation of a bipartisan deficit-reduction commission whose recommendations would be subject to an up-or-down vote of Congress — a measure Murray voted against.
That reflected a similar aversion to fiscal reform in Olympia, where less-than-dramatic proposals to save money by downsizing government — privatizing liquor sales, closing the state printing office, and merging fish and wildlife and state parks into the Department of Natural Resources — are apparently dead for this session. This in a year when state lawmakers should be jumping at ideas that save money.
Our legislative branches are a whole lot better at talking fiscal discipline than acting on it.
