The Sequester 2-step

[sirs]

So, we have an "earth is going to cease to exist scenario" if we allow a mere 2% cut in our massive trillions dollar budget.  And despite the sequestration was the brainchild of Obama & the Dems, the MSM cont to parrot the left's talking points that "compromise" is in order.  Yea, like the "compromise" made on the last fiscal cliff where taxes went up for some promise of spending reductions.  (sounds alot like the Palestinian/Isreal rhetoruc, you give us land, and we'll "promise" to seek peace....while we continue to call you pigs and advocate your cessation to exist)

And this is JUST the sequestration.  Coming up is the renewal of the Continuing Resolution....you know that inability for the government to even come up with a budget that they're legally/constitutionally required to come up with, but just keeps getting pushed furter and further down the road with these CR's.  And the CR is funding the entire government, not just a few measly sequestration cuts.  Just wait until the left starts pulling on those strings

[sirs]

Senate Democrats, Obama still have no ideas on sequester replacement … after 18 months
FEBRUARY 8, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

The Republican embrace of the sequester cuts has already paid dividends, even if all it does is slow the increase in spending rather than make real reductions in overall budgets.  It has forced Barack Obama to ask for a delay on his own budget proposal while offering no new ideas on spending reductions.  The move also forced Senate Democrats to go back to normal order to offer alternatives, and The Hill reports that they were utterly unprepared for it:

Senate Democrats are struggling to come up with a replacement for the $85 billion spending-cut sequester set to begin on March 1.

Key Democrats huddled Thursday in Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid’s (D-Nev.) office to discuss options for preventing the looming cuts after returning from a retreat in Annapolis where they discussed strategy with President Obama. …

Other senators said the party so far has not agreed on the balance of tax hikes and spending cuts in a package, on how big the package would be or on how much of the sequester it would replace.

Yeah, but other than that, they’ve got it nailed.  What else is there to discuss?  The bill title?

Remember, too, that the sequester was proposed by the White House, passed by both chambers of Congress, and signed by President Obama eighteen months ago.  At that time, no one expected it to actually activate; practically everyone expressed opposition to the sequester.  However, only the House actually took action to replace it — twice, in fact, passing bills that replaced the sequester cuts with other more rational spending reductions.  Neither the Senate nor the White House acted on those House bills, and neither entity proposed even a single specific idea for its replacement.

Even more amusing, the Senate has gone so long without passing a normal-order budget that Democrats aren’t quite sure what the process is any longer:

The Senate Finance Committee has jurisdiction over tax issues, but Sen. Max Baucus (D-Mt.), the panel’s chairman, said he wasn’t sure who would lead the bill through the Senate.

Asked if he would be the senator shepherding the bill, he responded: “Good question.”

Unbelievable.  After 18 months, the Democrats had no Plan B for the sequester, assuming that Republicans would be desperate to stop it themselves and would willingly go back into fiscal-cliff mode to deal with Obama and Harry Reid directly.  Instead, the decision to insist on normal order and require Democrats to produce a bill has exposed them as entirely unready to govern in both the Senate and the White House.

As I wrote yesterday for the Fiscal Times, this doesn’t mean that Republicans will win everything they want, but they’ve certainly made the real problem in spending discipline as clear as possible:

Obama provided plenty of dire warnings about the damage that his own budget-gimmick proposal may do if it becomes active in less than four weeks.  What Obama hasn’t provided is an actual solution for replacing his previous solution.  In fact, Obama hasn’t yet provided a budget proposal for FY2014, despite having a statutory requirement to do so by now – making four budget proposals out of Obama’s five opportunities that arrived late.  Instead of offering specific proposals for spending cuts to replace the sequester, Obama offered a vague demand for “tax reform” that would increase revenue again.

This deadline has been in place for months.  It became clear weeks ago that Republicans would likely allow the sequester to go forward, at least long enough to put pressure on replacement cuts from Democrats, and would be in position to refuse to raise any more revenue.  And yet Obama not only sounded like someone shocked out of a reverie, he offered nothing to resolve the standoff – and neither did Harry Reid and Senate Democrats, not even an offer to take up the bill approved by the House in the last session if passed again.

It turns out that the real crisis has been Democratic governance all along … or the lack of it

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WaPo/Pew sequestration poll question oddly missing an option
FEBRUARY 26, 2013 BY ED MORRISSEY

Let’s see if you can figure out what Pew and the Washington Post left out of this poll question about blame for the sequester.  I won’t even give you a hint, even if Rovin had to tip me to this by e-mail:



Say, where is the option for Senate Democrats? It might be a secret to the Washington Post that Democrats control one chamber of Congress, but if they dug around a little bit, they might discover that Harry Reid runs the Senate.  Of course, that hasn’t meant much in the last four years of budgeting, as Reid and his caucus have ignored the law that requires the Senate to actually produce a budget, but still, they’re at least nominally an independent player in this battle.

By the way, if the Senate had followed the law and produced normal-order budgets, we wouldn’t have the sequestration at all. The budget resolutions of both chambers would have gone to conference committee, which would have hashed out the differences.  Obama would have signed the budgets, and we would have avoided nearly four years of crisis funding for the federal government. 

Reid and Obama haven’t used normal order because they want to keep using continuing resolutions as a means to keep the inflated FY2010 spending levels as the baseline going forward, and especially because they want to keep House Republicans from having a real voice on spending and budgeting.

In this case, Pew and the Washington Post didn’t just leave out an option.  They left out the real culprit, both in the acute crisis (since the Senate still hasn’t produced a sequestration alternative in this session or the previous one) and in the chronic budget failure that produced it.

The Party of NO strikes again

[sirs]

Senate Democrats Should "Get Off Their Ass" and Do Their Job

House Speaker John Boehner is frustrated.  Why?  The legislative body he runs has passed two bills to replace the president's sequester with offsetting sprending cuts.  Democrats, who control the Senate and White House, have done nothing.  The upper chamber hasn't voted on a single legislative alternative, and the president hasn't outlined a specific plan of his own.  He's been far too busy flying around the country on Air Force One, holding campaign-style rallies designed to scare the living daylights out of people about the dire consequences of cutting 2.4 percent of 2013's projected federal spending -- which would still be higher than 2012 levels, even if those "cuts" are fully implemented. Boehner's had enough:
 
“We have moved a bill in the House twice. We should not have to move a third bill before the Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something,” Boehner (R-Ohio) told reporters in a press conference Tuesday morning. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) responded to Boehner with his own colorful rejoinder. “I think he should understand who is sitting on their posterior,” Reid said. “We’re doing our best here to pass something. The Speaker is doing nothing to try to pass anything over there.” 

What the hell is Reid talking about?  He's the leader of the Senate.  He can schedule a vote whenever he wants, but he hasn't.  The Dems can't even blame a GOP filibuster because you can't filibuster a non-existent bill.  Meanwhile, House Republicans have twice done what Reid is accusing Boehner of "doing nothing" to accomplish.  It's bizarro world stuff.  What Reid actually is doing is throwing down pointless gauntlets:
 
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid would support letting the $85 billion in across-the-board sequestration cuts take effect on Friday if Republicans don't agree to increasing taxes as part of an alternative plan, the Nevada Democrat said on Tuesday "Until there's some agreement on revenue, I think we should just go ahead with the sequester," Reid told reporters after a meeting with Senate Democrats. 

Um, yeah.  That's the plan, champ.  Here are the options Reid's presenting to Republicans: Either
(a) unravel the guaranteed, agreed-to cuts proposed and signed by the president by partially replacing them with new tax increases,
or
(b) resist new tax increases while allowing the agreed-to automatic spending cuts to go into effect as scheduled. 

Easy call.  Boehner is pledging to open door number two if Democrats don't "get off their ass," firmly ruling out the president's phony definition of "tax reform:"
 
Just two days before the sequester is set to take effect, House Speaker John Boehner will reject closing tax loopholes outside of a comprehensive rewrite of the Tax Code — the central tenet of President Barack Obama’s plan to blunt the automatic spending cuts known as the sequester. “Higher tax rates are not the answers to our problems,” Boehner said in a speech Tuesday to the Credit Union National Association, according to prepared remarks. “Spending is the problem, and spending cuts are the solution. Yes, we should close loopholes, but we should do it as part of tax reform that lowers rates and helps create jobs. And again, this should be one of Washington’s highest priorities.” 

Polling is all over the map.  People don't know much about the sequester and they're prepared to blame Republicans for it (although that trend line is improving slightly), and yet they agree with the GOP's policy preferences.  The new NBC/WSJ poll is filled with horrific data for Republicans -- they're seen as less reasonable, more partisan, and at fault for pretty much everything -- and most people see the sequester as a bad idea (although not as many seem to know whose idea it was).  But consider the response to this question:

To deal with the deficit, which of the following three options would you favor Congress moving ahead with -- the current set of automatic spending cuts, a plan that has more spending cuts, or a plan that has fewer spending cuts?

The current automatic cuts: 14 percent
A plan that has more cuts:  39 percent
A plan that has fewer cuts: 37 percent

So by a 53-37 margin, the public prefers either the current sequester or a replacement that cuts spending more.  And despite Obama's incessant doomsaying and reckless stunts, less than a third of respondents in a new Pew poll think the automatic cuts will negatively impact their lives.  That's a major scare fail for the president.  No wonder liberals are getting nervous that people will wake up on March 2nd and realize that reducing spending isn't all that bad, which would diminish the impact of future Obama hype-jobs.  Let's sew this piece up by circling back to the House Speaker: Boehner has absolutely no reason to back down or enter any closed-door negotiations.  Either the Democrats "get off their ass" and pass a plausible replacement bill of their own without any tax hikes, or the sequester goes through -- and the sun rises on Saturday morning.

While we're on the subject of Democrats getting "off their ass,"

1400 Days: No Senate Democrat Budget