The Senator from Kentucky blocked extended federal unemployment benefits and Cobra health coverage for the down and out and jobless Americans. Both expired today for millions.
No one in the Senate could reason with the man who is obviously hell bent on a crusade to further punish the struggling and out of work families in his district and across the U.S. Senator Bunning does not care about people in Kentucky. Nor does he care about anyone other than his vile, mean-spirited and narcissistic self.
There is no reason for Senator Bunning to have done this other than spite and pure cold hearted vindictiveness. He is not running for a third term. He chose to retire but he obviously has every intention of heaping as much hell and misery upon the American people as possible until November.
It takes a Texas Republican to go as low as Bunning.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas) took the floor after Reid to stick up for Bunning. He noted that there is broad bipartisan support for extending benefits, but said Bunning was right to take a stand against adding $10 billion to the deficit. He also pointed out that the jobs bill that Reid scrapped two weeks ago, crafted by Sens. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) and Max Baucus (D-Mont.), contained an extension of UI and COBRA.
Can someone please tell me why Republicans continue to vote for politicians who so nakedly hate them?
Aside from the human suffering there are financial consequences to the vindictive and mean spirited assholery of Jim Bunning and John Cornyn.
The stakes are enormous: provisions of last year's stimulus bill that allow extra weeks of unemployment benefits and COBRA health coverage are set to expire on Feb. 28. State workforce agencies have already sent out letters informing recipients that they'll be ineligible for extra "tiers" of benefits starting next month. The National Employment Law Project estimates that 1.2 million people will prematurely lose benefits in March.
Judy Conti, a lobbyist for the NELP, said that even when Bunning is eventually thwarted and the extension is passed, state governments will still have to deal with the extra administrative costs of shutting down and restarting the extended benefits programs.
"Once the program is retroactively reauthorized, the federal government is going to send the same amount of money, but his own state government is going to have to spend even more money," Conti said.
The National Employment Law Project (NELP) released a new report last week showing that ...
1.2 million jobless workers will become ineligible for federal unemployment benefits in March unless Congress extends the unemployment safety net programs from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA). By June, this number will swell to nearly 5 million unemployed workers nationally who will be left without any jobless benefits.
The Republican Party will apparently stop at nothing until it can successfully drive us all into a new era of The Grapes of Wrath.
I ask again: Why do people continue to vote for politicians who hate them and who have no regard whatsoever for the consequences of their reckless, inhumane and unforgivable behavior?
