Today Senator Jim Bunning (R-KY) continued objections to unemployment benefits extension, COBRA extensions and funding for highways by blocking the Senate from voting, again.
Last Friday Senator Bunning held a mini-filibuster to prevented the Senate from voting on a unemployment and health care extension bill that also including funds for State highway projects. Bunning’s actions have since cause the furlough of 2,000 transportation workers, halted construction on 41 economic recovery projects in 17 states, halted 400,000 Americans from relieving unemployment checks and forced doctors to take big cuts in Medicare payments and left 1.2 million jobless Americans without COBRA.
On Monday Senator Bunning spent most of the day avoiding the press and sometimes even running from the press as he flipped them the bird.
Today Bunning spoke out in an attempted to justify his callus regards towards American workers by reading a letter from a constituent that stands with him that it was OK to put people out of work and to keep those out of work from being able to eat and look for work.
"One single Republican senator is standing in the way of unemployment benefits for 400,000 Americans," Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash.) said from the Senate floor
"One single Republican senator has put posturing before people, politics before families and point-scoring before the needs of struggling Americans," she said. "The American people are sick of this, and the backlash to the blockage of this bill is evidence of that."
Sen. Charles E. Schumer (D-NY) said 54,000 people in his state, the most seriously affected, will lose unemployment benefits this week if Bunning continues to block the extensions. "It is vital, vital, vital that we move this forward," he said.
White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Tuesday this morning told a morning meeting with reporters, “I don’t know how you negotiate with the irrational.”
And the GOP can’t understand how Americans could possibly see them as obstructionists
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