Bipartisanship

Matthew Hoy
By Matthew Hoy on May 16, 2012

If there's one thing that President Barack Obama has managed to do over the past two years it's been to bring Democrats and Republicans together—in unanimous opposition to his budget.

A budget resolution based on President Obama’s 2013 budget failed to get any votes in the Senate on Wednesday.

In a 99-0 vote, all of the senators present rejected the president’s blueprint.

It’s the second year in a row the Senate has voted down Obama’s budget.

Obama's 2012 budget failed 97 to 0 last May after Obama himself last April said he wanted deeper deficit cuts.

The House earlier this year unanimously rejected Obama's budget.

For the past two years, Obama has failed to get a single Democrat to vote for his budget, let alone a Republican to crossover. The only reason Obama's budget even got a vote in the Senate was because the rules allow the minority party to bring legislation to the floor. For more than three years, the Senate Democratic leadership has steadfastly refused to pass a budget—in violation of (a toothless) law.

This continuing debacle raises two serious questions.

First, if the Democrats have a plan to deal with our trillion-dollar deficits and looming entitlement insolvency, why have they not laid out that plan as part of the budget process? Maybe they don't have a plan. Maybe they're a bunch of sheep without a single thought in their minds on how to deal with this problem. This is unlikely. Much more likely is that they do have a plan and know that the American people won't like it. They won't like it because the Democrats' plan isn't just to stick it to the rich—everyone knows there aren't enough of them and they don't have enough wealth, let alone income—but to the middle class as well. You simply can't sustain the levels of government spending Democrats are advocating without wholesale tax hikes. Better to spring it on the proles after Obama's been re-elected and the Democrats have (hopefully) held onto Senate control in 2012 than before and ensure that neither happens.

Second, what does this say about President Obama's leadership? For two straight years he's submitted a budget plan that's so laughable not a single elected representative from either party has voted for it. In the past 4 years he's passed two signature pieces of legislation: Obamacare and the stimulus. Neither one of these was written by the White House. They were constructed by House and Senate Democratic leadership with Obama smiling in the background. When it comes to actually doing the job of president, it's hard to imagine someone who has actually done less and posed more than Obama.

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