re: Jim Bunning. Paul Krugman, like many is wrong

Paul Krugman writes an editorial that can't get two sentences without being wrong.

"For days, Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky exploited Senate rules to block a one-month extension of unemployment benefits"

Jim Bunning did not exploit some obscure Senate rule.  The Senate asked for unanimous consent on a bill and he said no.  Surely well within his rights - if all Senators are required to unanimously support all bills, there's no point in having them.  Apparently, Krugman is unaware of the whole purpose of the Senate, to vote yes or no on things, and thinks that voting no in itself is an evil, exploiting a Senate rule.

Actually, Bunning wanted the Senate to follow it's own rules, "PayGo", and pay for the$10 billion expense.  Note that one of those links leads to the Democratic Senate Budget Committee website, which says:

However, this point of order is not self-enforcing like the sequestration process; a Senator must raise the point of order against any violating legislation.

In other words, Bunning followed precisely the rules, as created by the Democrats, to raise the point of order about Paygo.  To balance the cost, he proposed, quite reasonably, using some TARP funds.  He also proposed removing the "black-liquor" tax-credit.  But this was nixed on a procedural issue by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif).   Nobody is writing how she exploited Senate rules to block his bill.

Some of the angst was that the benefits were about to expire in days.  True - real people would be affected, and that would be painful.  Harry Reid decared it an "emergency", as one of his aides wrote:

“The short term extension of expiring provisions is designated emergency spending because in economic downturns of this magnitude the Senate has traditionally treated extraordinary assistance to the unemployed as an emergency,”

Now, the Senate knew a long time ago that unemployment was running out for some recipients.  Was the Senate suddenly surprised that the economy is in bad shape?  Did they have a mass fantasy that millions of new jobs would be created in February?  No, they are too lazy to plan ahead, and rushed through some last minute bill.  Hmm, that does sound "traditional" for our representatives, so I agree with that part of the statement.

All Harry Reid had to do was

1. agree quickly to spend TARP funds
2. agree quickly to allow Bunning's black-liquor amendment to proceed
3. Call for a cloture vote.  Presumably, it would pass about 98-2, and the Bill would then get passed.

But the Senate leader chose to try to make a political point, trusting the press to misreport the facts.  As Paul Krugman, unsurprisingly, did. See here for a blog about more misreporting of Bunning's actions as a "filibuster".  But it may have backfired - enough people are getting the truth to realize that Bunning may have picked the wrong time and place for his solitary stand, but he definitely had some right on his side.

One later addition.  As part of his column, Krugman writes that Republicans are in a weird moral universe, and that extending unemployment is "textbook economics".  However, as James Taranto points out, in Krugman's own textbook, Krugman wrote:

"Public policy designed to help workers who lose their jobs can lead to structural unemployment as an unintended side effect"

 Now, these are unusually tough times, I don't think that this one instance of extending unemployment insurance will cause structural unemployment, but a good find by Taranto.