Government Shutdown Looms

The following comments on Hot Air were in response to an article in Politico outlining the risks to Obama with his strategy.  We don't see how the media like Politico can spin this 11th hour intervention by Obama in favor of Obama and the Democrats when the Democrats had full control of the Congress and the White House on September 30, 2010, which was the last day for the FY10 budget.  As we have stated before, the fault for an FY11 budget not being passed lies completely with the Democrats period.

UPDATE from Hot Air:

There are a couple of problems for Obama in selling this. First, he’s been AWOL on the budget for months. He could have pressed Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid to produce a budget in 2010 when Democrats had full control of Congress. Where was his outrage then? It’s not exactly leadership to wait seven months past a budget deadline to finally get personally involved. For that matter, as I mentioned in my last post, this sudden burst of leadership has done nothing to produce a budget in the Senate, where his own party has a majority.


Second, a failure here runs the real risk of his previous lack of leadership getting a lot more attention. Presidents don’t usually make grandstanding efforts unless (a) they already have a victory in hand, or (b) a failure will suit their political purposes. The latter was true for Bill Clinton in 1995-6 because it was the Republicans who had full responsibility for producing a budget. That’s not true now, when Obama has been an absentee executive on budgets for seven months and couldn’t even lead his own team to do their jobs.

Obama could have closed the deal in September. Instead, Democrats at both ends of Pennsylvania Avenue ran away from their responsibilities out of fear of voter backlash if they revealed their true agenda, and in the Senate and the White House, they’re still running away. That may be many things, but leadership it is not.

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Flashback to 2010 when the House Democrats deemed the budget passed -- get that 'deemed' a budget passed.  That means the House Democrats didn't pass the budget through Committee, take a House vote on the budget, or appropriate the money for FY11.  What did they do all of last year as they also didn't read all of Obamacare before it was passed?  This was gross negligence on the part of then Speaker Pelosi and her leadership.  Instead of kicking her out, the Democrats rewarded her with electing her as Minority Leader to lead the Democrats in a Republican controlled House.

Article One, Section 7 of the United States Constitution:

All bills for raising Revenue shall originate in the House of Representatives; but the Senate may propose or concur with Amendments as on other Bills.

With that short statement in the Constitution, the House of Representatives is given the authority to write the budget and appropriate the money neither of which the House Democrats did last year.  For over 200 years, the President submits a budget to Congess at which time the House writes the budget bill which is sent to various committees for hearings before coming to the floor for a vote.  After the budget bill is passed in the House, it goes to the Senate and the President.  That all came to an end in 2010 thanks to Pelosi and her lack of leadership.

What a lot of people, especially the media, don't seem to understand is that even with passage of the budget that is  signed by the President, the money still has to be appropriated for each item of the budget.   Those appropriation hearings can get very heated in the House.  Each  portion of the budget, e.g., the Defense, State Department, Commerce, is passed separately by the House, forwarded to the Senate for a vote and then to the President for signature before any money can be sent to the various agencies for their fiscal year budget which starts 1 October every year.  Most of the time the appropriations bills end up in a joint committee to iron out the differences between the House and Senate.  After the compromise in the Joint Committee, the bills are voted on again by both Houses before sending to the President.  If the President vetoes an appropriations bill, it takes 2/3 vote to override which means in most cases going back committees to try and get a bill a President will sign.  Note once again that the 2010 Democrats led by Pelosi held no hearings on the budget or appropriations.

Now Obama and the Democrats want to blame Republicans because horror of horrors, the Republicans want to get the financial health of this Country back on track and quit overspending on 'nice to have' items or to pay back groups for their financial support of Obama in 2008.  The Obama budget broke the bank and looked like it was just thrown together in order to have a budget with no serious thought to the deficit for FY11 or the current budget submission for FY12.

It is hard to believe that the House during all of 2010 held no budget hearings or took votes to pass a budget.  What did their committees do?  They certainly did not all work on Obamacare as very few members of Congress were involved in that boondoggle.  We paid the Democrat House Members their salary and benefits all the time they were ignoring their primary duty in the Constitution -- pass a budget and appropriate the money to fund the Government.  They did neither and now today we face a Government shutdown for a budget that should have been passed in 2010.  Why wasn't Obama involved in getting his Democrat leaders to pass the FY11 budget in 2010?  There was no way the Republicans could have stopped the budget.

Obama has threatened to withhold the pay of troops in combat which would be a first but he is using every tactic in the books with the help of his adoring media to try and paint the Republicans as the ones responsible when it was the Democrats who didn't pass the budget and then appropriation bills for FY11 when they had complete domination of the Congress in 2010. 

Are the American people going to fall for the Obama copying of Bill Clinton?  We doubt it as most Americans are well aware that the Democrats are the ones responsible for no budget for FY11.  Will Obama actually withhold the pay of our combat troops or any military or is it an idle threat?.  He has vowed to veto the one week continuing resolution.  We have our doubts if he has the nerve to do that, but if he does it is for political purposes only to blame Republicans just like Libya was a political decision where he wanted to show he was the Commander in Chief.

It looks like this is all about Obama getting reelected in 2012 following the Clinton example -- he could care less about what this is going to do to the American people who are going to be without pay or jobs.  There is one huge miscalculation -- we have the Internet for new and don't have to depend on the Obama media for our news.  With his actions, Obama has signaled to the American people he could care less about us or the budget would have been passed in 2010 because the Democrats had full control. 

In the middle of the budget crises, he flew off to Pennsylvania for what was essentially a campaign stop after launching his run for reelection on Monday.  Same thing he did by going on spring break to Brazil while launching our military into a wartime operation in the skies of Libya.  Looks like his favorite plan is to get away from the White House when something controversial is happening.  Will Obama play golf during a Government shutdown?  He does during every other crises so why not this time. 

If the Government shuts down, remember your taxes are still due on April 18th.  If you file them by paper instead of on-line, they will be piling up in the mail room.  If you owe money and send a check, who knows when the check will get cashed.  Isn't the Government wonderful?  They could be shut down but the American taxpayer some of who will be newly unemployed who worked for the Government are still expected to pay their taxes.  Why?  If the Government cannot pass a budget then why should we have to pay taxes?

What will be the outcome tonight at midnight?  Will they actually take negotiations to the end?  Time will tell today.

Get ready for another bumpy ride by Obama as the budget for FY12 written by Chairman Paul Ryan and his budget committee is about to be debated in Committees.  Already the Democrats are squealing about the budget but since they didn't even have a budget written for FY11, they need to sit down and shut up.  Leadership of the Democrats in the House should have been shown the door for not passing an actual budget and instead deemed a budget passed with FY10 figures used to get the United States even more in debt.  Irresponsibility on the part of Obama and the Democrats yet Obama wants reelected while Pelosi wants to take the House back to further bankrupt this Country by using scare tactics that are not true.

Stay tuned for more updates today!  We are waiting to see if Obama actually vetoes the week's continuing resolution?  We are betting he won't but if he does, he is the sole responsible person for shutting down the Government unless Reid comes to his rescue and the Senate rejects the continuing resolution.  Adults behaving like spoiled brats sums up Obama and the Democrat leadership as they want to play using only their rules.

Most amazing thing of all of this is my inbox for email.  The days, it has been filling up with stories about the impending shutdown of Government -- this morning -- NOTHING.