The Buck Never Stops With Them

From a friend in Washington:

Former OMB Director and White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew did the full tour of all five Sunday shows this morning, failing on each show to articulate how their upcoming budget would lift the crushing burden of debt and tackle our nation’s most pressing challenges. Instead, Lew confirmed reports of familiar ‘stimulus’ spending initiatives, recycled tax increases, and exploiting tired budget gimmicks.

Lew did break news in one area, however: when it comes to the fact that the Democrat-controlled U.S. Senate has failed to pass a budget in over 1,000 days, the White House’s dodge has now turned to deception. The federal government continues to spend trillions of dollars, yet Senate Democrats have – for three straight years – refused to prioritize Washington’s spending and borrowing. Senate Democrats, by refusing to honestly confront the debt threat, have chosen to accelerate our most pressing fiscal and economic challenges.

When asked earlier this week about the Senate Democrats historic failure, Press Secretary Jay Carney claimed that the White House had “no opinion” on whether or not the Senate should pass a budget.

This morning, when pressed further on this question, Lew revealed a stunning deception with respect to the budget process. Lew claimed on both CNN and Meet the Press that a supermajority is needed to pass a budget resolution in the U.S. Senate, and that a ‘filibuster’ is what stands in the way of Senator Reid’s inability to pass a budget.

- Jack Lew on MTP: “Well, one of the things about the United States Senate that I don’t think the American people realize is that it takes 60 not 50 votes to pass something.”
- Jack Lew on CNN: “We also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support.”

That is simply false: “The budget resolution…requires only a majority vote to pass, and its consideration is one of the few actions that cannot be filibustered in the Senate.”

Confusion when it comes to the budget law is nothing new for this Administration. The President’s budget request tomorrow is already past the deadline set by the 1974 Congressional Budget Act, the latest in a lengthy string of violations of their legal obligations.

Has the White House bothered to ask their party’s leaders in the U.S. Senate the real reason they refuse to prioritize the American people’s tax dollars? Is it that they can’t admit to how much more they want to take from hardworking American families in order to fuel their spending appetite?

Tomorrow’s belated budget request from the President will likely provide some guidance to these questions. With respect to why Democrat leaders fear detailing their real priorities, Chairman Paul Ryan noted the following this past week:

While President Obama shirks his responsibility to advance solutions to our fiscal challenges, he can no longer hide from the merciless math of the balance sheet.

We have pressured the President to put forward a number of deficit-reduction proposals – and while none has offered a credible solution to our fiscal crisis, each one has revealed a little bit more about what the President would do if he were forced to end the deficits. It wouldn’t be pretty. His proposals have three things in common: they load massive tax increases on small businesses and hardworking families, they require bureaucratic rationing in government health care programs, and they hollow out our national security.

Every time we force the President and his party’s leaders to get specific on how they would solve our fiscal challenges, they show us an agenda that does great harm to our economic security, our health security, and our national security.

Obama’s White House is more of the same. Really dumb ideas to solve very deep and complex problems. It’s not a White House that has thought of ways to get us out of the mess-but it’s simply used the White House to redirect our path and speed it down the drain to European style socialism.