Democrats expect voters not to notice, or care if they do notice,
that legislators have not passed a budget for next year's federal
spending.
The Pelosi-Reid "leadership" team have "gone off the grid" of
congressional practice and not even pretended to care about spending
targets and deficit projections. Humming "que sera sera, what ever will
be will be," they twirl toward summer vacation and the November
elections beyond.
President Obama and his congressional allies expect to be assisted
in their casual shuffling off of the most basic of Article I duties by
a Manhattan-Beltway media elite, quick to assure their dwindling
audiences that the abandonment of budgeting isn't completely without
precedent. Lefty pundits can and will point to a year or two where the
pressures of business ended the hope of a formal budget.
The president's pals in the press will be hard-pressed, though, to
find any years in which the effort wasn't even begun, and there is no
example of a year wherein a deficit like the one the country faces
today went unaddressed by a national budget plan.
They cannot find such a parallel because we have quite
unprecedented deficits --soaring, arching, never-seen-before gushers of
red ink dwarfing Bush's 2007 deficit of $160 billion by nine or 10 or
even more times that amount. We cannot know for certain how high the
tower of borrowed money will even approximately rise because, well,
there is no budget.
The new cliche is that such magical budgeting practices are
"unsustainable." They are sadly much more sustainable when everyone in
power agrees to pretend that they aren't there.
Thus do the Democrats steel themselves to face a furious
electorate: "What deficit? We don't have no stinking deficit. We
haven't even passed a budget yet."
Democrats in the rank and file appear to understand that this will
not work in the age of Tea Party activism. Clueless Dems like the very
flappable Rep. Bob Etheridge, D-N.C., erupt in anger at the appearance
of a flip phone, while others cower in their district offices, afraid
they will be asked deeply unfair questions like, "Do you support the
entire Obama agenda?" The White House advance office is scrambling to
line up gigs for the president in the fall, where his act is suddenly
as popular as Melanie backed up by the Lettermen.
The Gulf spill parade of fiascos is adding to the president's
ever-present and growing aura of vincibility, and Hill staffers are
freshening up the resume. They should be.
There is a vast, coast-to-coast recognition of "oiiohh" -- Obama
is in over his head. I have offered the T-shirt to my radio audience,
and they are moving quite briskly. The "messiah" has become a punch
line.
What could he do to turn it around, I asked John Podhoretz, editor
of the newly energized and sparkling Commentary magazine. "Things his
ideology will never allow him to do," John replied, and we went on to
talk about extending the Bush tax cuts and standing resolutely beside
Israel in the face of serial provocations.
There are other steps, and the House and Senate could actually try
to control spending rather than hold useless show trials of already
convicted BP execs. Voters from coast to coast know the issue is the
stalemated recovery and the exploding spending that is doing nothing to
turn on the jobs machine.
If the GOP runs on extending the existing tax rates five years
while bringing a massive ax to the federal budget, they will sweep all
before them. "Enough!" is the one-word bumper sticker showing up across
the country and uniting every candidate from the center to the
libertarian right.
"Enough!" is enough of a slogan. Not even the Republicans can
screw that up.
Examiner Columnist Hugh Hewitt is a law professor at Chapman
University Law School and a nationally syndicated radio talk show host
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