President's Budget Fails to get a Single Vote in Congress

by Rick Moran

Not even Democrats are standing behind their presumptive party leader and the key to their electoral success in 2012.

Washington Times:

President Obama's budget suffered a second embarrassing defeat Wednesday, when senators voted 99-0 to reject it.

Coupled with the House's rejection in March, 414-0, that means Mr. Obama's budget has failed to win a single vote in support this year.

Republicans forced the vote by offering the president's plan on the Senate floor.

Democrats disputed that it was actually the president's plan, arguing that the slim amendment didn't actually match Mr. Obama's budget document, which ran thousands of pages. But Republicans said they used all of the president's numbers in the proposal, so it faithfully represented his plan.

Sen. Jeff Sessions, Alabama Republican, even challenged Democrats to point out any errors in the numbers and he would correct them - a challenge no Democrats took up.

"A stunning development for the president of the United States in his fourth year in office," Mr. Sessions said of the unanimous opposition.

The White House has held its proposal out as a "balanced approach" to beginning to rein in deficits. It calls for tax increases to begin to offset higher spending, and would begin to level off debt as a percentage of the economy by 2022. It would produce $6.4 trillion in new deficits over that time.

By contrast the chief Republican alternative from the House GOP would notch just $3.1 trillion in deficits, and three Senate Republican alternatives would all come in below $2 trillion.

John Hinderaker of Powerline:

This means that the presidents FY 2013 budget has now been rejected by the House and Senate by a combined vote of 513-0. Earlier today, as Paul noted in a post a little while ago, Obama demanded a "serious bipartisan approach" to the nation's budgetary crisis. Bipartisan? He can't even get a single Democrat to support his radically irresponsible proposals.

Four different Republican budgets were taken up by the Senate. The House budget (commonly referred to as the Ryan budget) was voted down 41-58. The vote on Pat Toomey's budget was 42-47; the vote on Rand Paul's budget was 16-83; and the vote on Mike Lee's budget was 17-82. The common denominator was that no Democrat had the courage to vote for any of them.

Not even Democrats are stupid enough to vote for a tax increase in an election year. But beyond the political, there is the notion that the president's numbers don't add up, that his pie in the sky assumptions about the economy and belief that congress would cut everything he asked made his plan "dead on arrival" when it got to Capitol Hill.

The president's game playing with the nation's future has been exposed for the dangerous political ploy it is. And not even members of his own party want to participate.

Rick Moran

Source: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/05/presidents_budget_fails_to_get_a_single_vote_in_congress.html

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