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Fred Barnes notes Obama’s reneges in the trade deals.
The path to ratification by Congress was greased after President Obama renegotiated trade treaties with South Korea, Colombia, and Panama. Obama would supply Democratic votes. Republicans were already on board, President Bush having put together the treaties in the first place. It had the look of a done deal.
It wasn’t. In May, the White House suddenly insisted the treaties be accompanied by roughly $1 billion in Trade Adjustment Assistance, or TAA as it’s known in Washington. Organized labor was demanding TAA funds be set aside for workers whose jobs might be lost as a result of the treaties. Obama took up the cause.
That wasn’t the last of labor’s demands. A month ago, labor officials said TAA had to be part of the trade agreements themselves. Again, Obama went along. This was unprecedented. Spending legislation had never been included in trade bills. Republican support instantly collapsed. It took the intervention of Senator Rob Portman of Ohio and a few other Republicans to get things back on track by stripping TAA from the treaties. Separate votes on the three pacts and TAA are likely in September. But don’t hold your breath.
There’s a pattern here that’s become emblematic of the Obama presidency. …
David Harsanyi brings us back to the debt limit thingy.
When a reporter recently asked President Barack Obama about the House Republican efforts to pass the Cut, Cap and Balance Act of 2011, Obama explained that politicians “don’t need a constitutional amendment to do our jobs. The Constitution already tells us to do our jobs — and to make sure that the government is living within its means and making responsible choices.”
Dear God, we’re doomed.
Remember that the president’s last tangible stab at a “responsible choice” was a budget that would have added $9 trillion of debt over the next 10 years. This was months before he realized the debt ceiling debate and “economic Armageddon” could bring about political opportunity. The White House went on to call the bill, which trades a debt ceiling increase for a constitutional balanced-budget amendment and caps on spending, “extreme, radical and unprecedented.”
Considering nearly every state works with similar restrictions, it’s not exactly unprecedented. And if it’s “extreme, radical and unprecedented” to the administration, it undoubtedly makes plenty of fiscal sense. …
And Mark Steyn writes on the president’s plan.
… The only “plan” Barack Obama has put on paper is his February budget. Were there trillions and trillions of savings in that? Er, no. It increased spending and doubled the federal debt.
How about Harry Reid, the Senate Majority Leader? Has he got a plan? No. The Democratic Senate has shown no interest in producing a budget for two-and-a-half years. Unlike the president, Sen. Reid can’t even be bothered pretending he’s interested in spending reductions. But he is interested in spending, and, if that’s your bag, boring things like budgets only get in the way.
It seems reasonable to conclude from the planlessness and budgetlessness of the Obama/Reid Democrats that their only plan is to carry on spending without limit. Otherwise, someone somewhere would surely have written something down on a piece of paper by now. But no, apparently the Department of Writing Down Plans is the only federal expense the president is willing to cut. You begin to see why the Europeans are a little miffed. They’re passing austerity budgets so austere they’ve spawned an instant anti-austerity movement rioting in the street – and yet they’re still getting downgraded by the ratings agencies. In Washington, by contrast, the ruling party of the Brokest Nation in History has no spending plan other than to plan to spend even more – and nobody’s downgrading them.
Well, don’t worry. It’s coming. The domestic media coverage of this story has been almost laughably fraudulent: To the court eunuchs, a failure to raise the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion would signal to the world that American government was embarrassingly dysfunctional. In reality, raising the debt ceiling by a couple of trillion without any spending cuts would confirm to the world that American government is terminally dysfunctional. …
Charles Krauthammer retails his favorite debt limit plan.
… What to do now? The House should immediately pass the Half-Trillion Plan, thereby putting something eminently reasonable on the table that the president will have to address with a serious counterproposal using actual numbers. If the counterproposal is the G6, Republicans should accept Part One with its half-trillion dollars in cuts, consumer price index change and repeal of the CLASS Act, i.e., the part of the G6 that is enacted immediately and that is real. Accompany this with a dollar-for-dollar hike in the debt ceiling, yielding almost exactly the time envisioned in the G6 to work out grander spending and revenue changes — and defer any action on Part Two until precisely that time.
The Half-Trillion with or without the G6 Part One: ceiling raised, crisis deferred, cuts enacted and time granted to work out any Grand Compromise. You can’t get more reasonable than that.
Do it. And dare the president to veto it.
George Will gets in on the debate too.
Obama vaguely promises to “look at” savings from entitlements because “we need to find trillions in savings over the next decade.” But when McConnell learned that negotiations chaired by Vice President Biden had identified a risible $2 billion in 2012 discretionary spending cuts — a sum equal to a rounding error on the GM bailout — McConnell concluded that Obama’s frugality pantomime required a response that will define the 2012 election choice.
Obama’s rhetorical floundering is the sound of a bewildered politician trying to be heard over the long, withdrawing roar of ebbing faith in a failing model of governance. From Greece to California, with manifestations in Italy, Spain, Portugal, Ireland, Illinois and elsewhere, this model is collapsing. Entangled economic and demographic forces are refuting the practice of ever-bigger government financed by an ever-smaller tax base and by imposing huge costs on voiceless future generations.
Richard Miniter, a Forbes columnist, is right: “Obama is not the new FDR, but the new Gorbachev.” Beneath the tattered, fading banner of reactionary liberalism, Obama struggles to sustain a doomed system. Democrats’ dependency agenda — swelling the ranks of government employees, multiplying government-subsidized industries, enveloping ever-more individuals in the entitlement culture — is buckling under an intractable contradiction: It is incompatible with economic growth sufficient to create enough wealth to feed the multiplying tax eaters.
Events are validating the Tea Partyers’ arguments. Time is on their side — but not on America’s, unless the impediment to reform is removed in 16 months.
Jennifer Rubin thinks the adults in Congress (Who knew we’d ever write those words?) are going to find a way to make a deal. Then we’ll see what the petulant president will do.
Speaker of the House John Boehner (R-Ohio) was forced to take matters into his own hands. The White House meeting with President Obama on Saturday morning was brief and unproductive. The name of the game then became for congressional Democratic and Republican leaders to make a deal that would be ready to announce today.
The image of the president’s angry press conference on Friday made for a stark contrast with the bipartisan congressional efforts throughout Saturday afternoon. Even Obama’s most fawning admirers had to admit that he hadn’t improved his stature in the episode. (David Brooks observed, “I’ve never seen a presidential press conference with the president so angry in public. . . . But the president’s tone of being the only adult in Washington, everyone else is a child, that he’s going to summon people to the White House as if they are kindergartners, even if you agree on the substance, it’s kind of hard to go along with someone who is insulting you all the time.”)
So much for the White House. Now it’s time to make a deal. The Post reports: …