Oba­ma, Where’s the Bill?

The Pres­i­dent this morn­ing appeared at a cam­paign-style event designed to lay out his views on the sequester, across-the-board cuts to mil­i­tary and non-enti­tle­ment domes­tic spend­ing sched­uled to take effect on March 1.

To sum­ma­rize, the Pres­i­dent believes that these cuts are a bad thing, that they should be replaced with a “bal­anced” com­bi­na­tion of tax increas­es and more tar­get­ed spend­ing cuts, and that if the cuts do occur, it will be the fault of Con­gres­sion­al Repub­li­cans, who want to “dou­ble down” on “harsh, harm­ful cuts.”

His remarks con­trast­ed his char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the GOP plan with that of Sen­ate Democ­rats and his own. The only prob­lem is, nei­ther the Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­t­ic sequester alter­na­tive bill nor his own bud­get exist.

Let’s begin with the Sen­ate Demo­c­ra­t­ic plan. The Pres­i­dent said this morn­ing, “I know Democ­rats in the House and in the Sen­ate have pro­posed such a plan — a bal­anced plan, one that pairs more spend­ing cuts with tax reform that clos­es spe­cial inter­est loop­holes and makes sure that bil­lion­aires can’t pay a low­er tax rate than their salary — their secretaries.”

The prob­lem is that what he knows just ain’t true. Sen­ate Democ­rats have not yet pro­posed a bill, break­ing for a recess after dis­cussing the out­lines of a pro­pos­al at their par­ty lun­cheon last Thurs­day. That dis­cus­sion report­ed­ly did not pro­duce a con­sen­sus. While lib­er­al Sen­a­tors seem pre­pared to acqui­esce to the out­line of a pro­pos­al, at least two mod­er­ate Democ­rats who are up for re-elec­tion next year – Mark Begich (D‑AK) and Mary Lan­drieu (D‑LA) – may well oppose it.

All of this is, of course, irrel­e­vant, since none of us yet knows what the “it” is. What we do know is that the Sen­ate entered into a unan­i­mous con­sent agree­ment under which Demo­c­ra­t­ic leader Leader Har­ry Reid (D‑NV) and Repub­li­can Leader Mitch McConnell (R‑KY) will be rec­og­nized to intro­duce bills deal­ing with seques­tra­tion next Mon­day or Tues­day. Once the bills are intro­duced, the Sen­ate can vote on whether to begin debate on one or both.

The fact that nei­ther bill exists did not deter the Pres­i­dent from announc­ing his pref­er­ence for the non-exis­tent bill that Sen­a­tor Reid will intro­duce over the non-exis­tent McConnell measure.

Speak­ing of non-exis­tent bud­get pro­pos­als, the Pres­i­dent also said this morn­ing, “Now, for two years, I’ve offered a bal­anced approach to deficit reduc­tion that would pre­vent these harm­ful cuts.” That would be quite impres­sive, indeed, since the seques­tra­tion pro­vi­sion was not writ­ten until August 2011 and was only a hypo­thet­i­cal pos­si­bil­i­ty until Decem­ber of that year, after the so-called “super-com­mit­tee” failed to pro­duce a deficit reduc­tion pro­pos­al. So it would have been impos­si­ble for the Pres­i­dent to have advanced a plan to avoid sequestration’s “harm­ful cuts” in Feb­ru­ary 2011.

Nit-pick­ing aside, Feb­ru­ary 4 was the dead­line by which the Pres­i­dent was to sub­mit his new bud­get. It is now more than two weeks over­due and the Pres­i­dent this morn­ing gave no indi­ca­tion of when it will be released. As a result, his state­ment that “the House and the Sen­ate are work­ing on bud­gets” is also erro­neous. The Con­gres­sion­al bud­get process does not start until after the Con­gres­sion­al Bud­get Office com­pletes its analy­sis of the President’s bud­get which, sad­ly, will not exist until some unspec­i­fied date in the future.

Now I don’t expect the Pres­i­dent to acknowl­edge his respon­si­bil­i­ty for stalling the bud­get process. Still, a detailed pro­pos­al from the White House as to the government’s fis­cal path over the next decade would pro­vide a use­ful point of ref­er­ence as Con­gress con­tem­plates whether to allow seques­tra­tion to take effect on March 1 and as it con­sid­ers what to do about fund­ing for gov­ern­ment agen­cies, which expires on March 27.

To be sure, we know that the Pres­i­dent is more com­fort­able with bor­row­ing, tax­ing and spend­ing than are Repub­li­cans. We know that Repub­li­cans object to rais­ing tax­es, espe­cial­ly just weeks after Con­gress locked in high­er rates for top earn­ers and pay­roll tax increas­es for all wage earners.

But deci­sions of this con­se­quence require more than polit­i­cal rhetoric. Detail is essen­tial. My guess is that the Pres­i­dent can come up with a bud­get that includes some good ideas. It would be nice to see it.