When Did History Begin, Anyway?

Greetings from the Left Coast!

Another of the most annoying lies of this election season is the one about how poor President Obama can't get things fixed because of the evil, obstructionist Republicans. It's as though the first two years of his Presidency never took place - you know, those two years when the Democrats had a majority in the House, and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate, and the Republicans were completely powerless to stop anything. We talked about that just yesterday. It's how we got the stimulus bill that didn't stimulate, because the shovel-ready jobs turned out not to be as shovel-ready as we'd thought, and the 2,700 page health care bill that we had 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 budget bill while also refusing to pass one of it's own. We haven't had an actual federal budget since 2009. We've just been kicking the can down the road by passing a series of "continuing resolutions" that simply agree to keep 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 failed to get even a single vote from anyone in his own party.

The only good thing about that is that at least spending hasn't continued to grow astronomically as it would have if his budget proposals had been approved. So remember that when you hear the spin about how federal spending has been flat over the last three years under President Obama. It isn't for lack of trying on his part - it's because the Democrats in Congress are too irresponsible to actually pass a budget bill, and too afraid to go on record as supporting the level of spending that they'd really like to have. They'd rather blame the Republicans and hope that we're too stupid to figure out what's really going on.

If President Obama is looking for someone to blame, all he needs to do is invite Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid over for breakfast, then pull up a fourth chair and prop up a mirror in it.