February 24, 2013 by David K. Sutton
Sequestration: Blame President Obama? – Only Congress Can End It
There’s plenty of talk about who is to blame for the sequestration, the automatic spending cuts set to kick in on Friday. Obama blames congress. Prominent Republican members of congress, like Speaker John Boehner, blame the president. Bob Woodward wrote an op-ed in The Washington Post putting the blame squarely on White House. “My extensive reporting for my book ‘The Price of Politics‘ shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House,” said Woodward. It was the “brainchild of [Jack] Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.”
Regardless of who came up with the idea, you must remember this — they were negotiating over the debt ceiling when the sequestration idea hatched. A failure to get a deal would have meant defaulting on our debt. Does it really matter who came up with the idea of sequestration when put into context?
The issue is not the sequestration. The issue is that we have radical Republicans in congress who believe they were sent there to bust up the joint. They believe government is the problem. They are there to prove it. As long as the mainstream media and journalists like Bob Woodward ignore the real story of extreme right-wing ideologues in positions of power, we will continue to have these episodes every 3 to 6 months. This has been the story for several years now. Of course, it gives the media something to talk about, so maybe there is no interest in exposing these extremists on Capitol Hill.
In the end, it doesn’t matter who came up with the idea of sequestration because it will take an act of congress to alter it or end it. Both houses could pass a simple piece of legislation, one sentence actually, that could end the sequestration. President Obama would surely sign it. But you know the radical Republicans in the House of Representatives would not vote to end the sequestration. So who’s to blame again?
