Being a politician has its perks, and by perks, I mean power. It means that you are the person that gets to decide how the people that elected you should live their lives.

There are upsides and downsides to this, depending on the politician. None are humble and considerate, though a few might put your interests ahead of their own or those of whichever groups are donating sums of money to them at the moment. In any case, there are bad politicians and then there are worse politicians. Sometimes, the only way to tell one from the other is to see which they put first: their personal agenda or the agenda of their corporate sponsors.

Believe it or not, I actually find the politicians that put the interests of those lining their pockets first to be the most trustworthy. This makes them dependable in that you can count on them to stand for certain things—you can count on them to cast votes in favor of their donors’ agenda.

In my experience, it is those who put their own agenda ahead of those who pay or interests of the people who elect them that are scary. This makes them completely unreliable and, more often than not, something that trained political observers like to call batshit crazy.

They do things like this based on some twisted logic that abortion is murder, but providing healthcare to babies that are actually born depends on free-market economics and putting food in their mouths is socialism.

With politicians like these, one never knows what legislation they might bring to a grinding halt just because one minor provision in it might disagree with their moral beliefs, which they in turn try to apply to everyone else through rule of law.

They have done much to hold the country back over the years by filibustering landmark legislation to end segregation, or tie up the legislative process with bills mandating that school children recite the “Lord’s Prayer.”

Such a thing happened in Washington last week when Republican Sen. Jim Bunning of Kentucky held a one-man filibuster of a procedural vote on the Senate floor. The vote was for an extension to provide unemployment benefits to over a million Americans because he did not foresee a way that the government could pay for them.

Bunning’s move was one part fiscal conservatism combined with an attempt to take a jab at President Obama’s demands that all programs from here forward be pay as you go, meaning that money that did not exist would not be allotted to the programs. The problem with Bunning’s reasoning was that the extension did have guaranteed funding, and even if the funding was not guaranteed, the delay would mean millions of unemployed Americans would lose their only source of income.

His successful opposition to the amendment kept it from being passed on time, and at the stroke of midnight that night, those people lost their unemployment benefits. Because the procedural vote and the final vote did not go through on time, the next day there was an immediate 21 percent funding decrease to Medicare and Tricare, the government subsidized system that provides health care to veterans.

The decrease meant that doctors would now be unable to see as many recipients of these programs because they would not be reimbursed for seeing them. In addition, Bunning’s objections led to the immediate furlough of thousands of people working on the interstate highway system.
But as the night ended in the Senate, on the evening that this one man held the governmental process hostage and single-handedly threatened the wellbeing of millions of Americans all over a minute detail, Bunning had but one regret:

“I have missed the Kentucky-South Carolina game that started at 9 o’clock, and it’s the only redeeming chance we had to beat South Carolina since they’re the only team that has beat Kentucky this year,” Bunning said.

It is too bad Bunning is retiring from the Senate at the end of this term. Otherwise, I would suggest that he get a Tivo so that unemployed Americans can feed their children and veterans can get healthcare. Either way, as the person who wrought this havoc by splitting imaginary hairs, I think he needs to be committed. And that is why I trust the corporate shills in Congress over the crazies.

Andy Phipps is News Editor and a columnist for The Current.