This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, March 8th, 2010. I'm Caleb Brown.

Senator Jim Bunning of Kentucky is thrown a perfect game, but is also high on the all-time list for

hit batsman.

For objecting to Congress declaring non-emergency spending to be emergency spending,

Bunning has successfully highlighted the fact that so-called pay-go rules aren't being taken very seriously in Congress.

Brandon Arnold, Director of Government Affairs at the Cato Institute, comments.

Jim Bunning has caught a lot of flack in the media, certainly, of late, because he's been holding up a piece of legislation or he held up a piece of legislation that was very popular politically. It included a number of provisions like unemployment insurance extensions,

COBRA extension, which is basically health insurance for people who do not have jobs.

A bunch of popular provisions and he certainly became the butt of a lot of jokes and the

and the target of a lot of jokes and the target of a lot of criticism as a result.

It seems though a lot of that is unwarranted.

Essentially what he was trying to do was not block those provisions, not block those

extensions of certain programs, but instead make sure that the Congress actually paid for

them and thus enforcing the PAYgo rule that governs the actions of both the

House and the Senate. Now it should govern the actions of both the House and the

Senate in general but in this case they were prepared not to do that.

Well sure fiscal conservatives have always liked PAYGO in theory but derided the fact that it's so easy to

circumvent. Essentially you can the majority leader can simply designate spending as emergency spending,

and therefore it's not subject to the supermajority 60 vote threshold in the Senate.

And that's exactly what Harry Reid did this time.

Because these things are so popular,

unemployment insurance, for instance,

...