One of the biggest lies of this election season is the one about how poor President Obama hasn’t been able to fix things because he’s been blocked by those evil, obstructionist Republicans. It’s as though the first two years of his Presidency never happened — you know, those first two years when the Democrats held a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, and the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything. That was when we got the stimulus that didn’t stimulate because the shovel-ready jobs weren’t as shovel-ready as we thought, and the 2,700-page health care bill that we needed to pass so we could find out what was in it.
Since the Republicans took back the House in the 2010 election, they’ve at least passed a budget bill. The Democrat-controlled Senate refuses to even debate the House bill while also refusing to pass one of its own. We haven’t had an actual federal budget since 2009 — did you know that? We’ve been kicking the can down the road through a series of “continuing resolutions” that simply agree to continue funding everything at its current level for a few more months … hence the unending string of trillion-dollar deficits.
The last two budget proposals President Obama sent up the Hill have failed to get even a single vote from anyone in his own party. The only good news about this is that at least spending hasn’t continued to grow as it would if his proposals had been passed. So remember that when you hear the spin about how federal spending hasn’t increased during the last three years of Obama’s presidency. It isn’t for lack of trying on his part — it’s because the Democrats are too irresponsible to actually pass a budget and too afraid to go on record as supporting the levels of spending that they really want. They’d rather blame the Republicans and hope that we aren’t paying attention to what’s really going on.
If the president is looking for someone to blame, all he needs to do is invite Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi over for breakfast, and set up a mirror in the fourth chair.
Sid Herron
Bothell
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