The President and his compliant enablers - Guy Benson: "Our useless White House press corps."
The one part of this annoyingly predictable press conference that was particularly grating was Obama lamenting woe is me: "What would you have me do?" How about a regular order budget, chief? That answer never occurred to either Obama or all those "smart folks" in the press room.
But then producing a budget would require work and we know that campaigning is his skill set.
Extra - From Legal Insurrection.
3 comments:
Stipulated: there's supposed to be a budget, and there should be one.
That said, how would a budget do a blessed thing to resolve this sequestration fight?
The inability to strike a deal has zero to do with the absence of a regular order budget. It's not like the automatic cuts have nowhere to go, because nobody knows where the money has been allocated. Budgets carved into the side of Mount Rushmore by the finger of God would have prompted the same GOP response and Democratic counterresponse once we neared the debt ceiling.
If I remember correctly, the sequester was part of the 2011 Budget Control Act which was necessary because there was no regular order budget.
Now on to the continuing resolution fight and the debt limit fight.
That's not what happened. That law was entirely about the debt ceiling, not the lack of a budget. If we genuinely had "no budget," then there's no way America could have hit that ceiling, or defaulted on a payment. We can't work to balance something that "doesn't exist."
What we had was an amount of govt spending that approached the debt ceiling's limit without having been codified as a single piece of legislation. The debt ceiling has been with us a century, long before the absence of a budget, and is distinct from it. The debt ceiling has been raised around 70 times in the last 50 years; there haven't been 70 missing budgets.
Congress could have called its bill the 2011 Budget's Budgetary Budget Control Act Overseeing Our Budgety Budge-Budge-a-Budget Banana Fana Fo Fudget, and it wouldn't make the lack of regular order Obama budgets the cause, or crux, of anything. Besides that, Obama hasn't failed to deliver budgets; he's submitted one every year (usually late), but none have been passed. There's been cynical gamesmanship on both sides, and the Budget Control Act is Exhibit A for that.
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