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Obama: The Sequester Jester
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 7:12 am
by _bcspace
Friday’s sequester meeting to provide cover for Obama, lawmakersDemocrats and other low information voters don't recall that the sequester was Obama's own bluff and it was called. Keep drinking that Kool-Aid. Liberals and other socialists don't have the education to remember their darling love toy, Jim Jones, who first doled it out......
Re: Obama: The Sequester Jester
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 6:20 pm
by _Brackite
From The
Washington Post:
Obama’s sequester deal-changer
By Bob Woodward, Published: February 22
...
What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?
The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”
The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.
“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”
The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.
Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.
Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”
A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.
...
Re: Obama: The Sequester Jester
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 7:46 pm
by _krose
A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.
Talk about "low-information" voters.
It was well covered at the time, by the way, that they would assemble a committee to come up with a solution, and if they didn't, there would be automatic painful cuts.
Re: Obama: The Sequester Jester
Posted: Fri Mar 01, 2013 8:19 pm
by _krose
The right's obsession with whose idea the "sequester" itself was, is a pathetic attempt to get the country to blame the president for the automatic spending cuts, even though they have been yammering incessantly about the need for deep cuts.
We should all remember that none of this Sturm und Drang needed to happen. There was no fiscal crisis until the Republicans in Congress created one. And it was all in an effort to hurt the economy and ensure that there would be no recovery during the term of a president they despised.
It all started when they came up with the bright idea of suddenly refusing to allow an increase in the debt ceiling, something they never considered during the Bush years (odd, right?).
Instead of calling their bluff and waiting for them to cave, Obama naïvely thought he could negotiate with them in good faith. Big mistake.