If you cut through all of the political spin and media fog,
here’s what’s happening in the so-called debt negotiations:
Congressional Republicans are negotiating; Obama’s campaigning.
They’re legislating (or at least trying to legislate); he’s
grandstanding. They want to cut the debt; he wants to win
reelection. The result: impasse.
That Obama is not negotiating in good faith is obvious. He
hasn’t offered up a budget; he hasn’t proposed a debt reduction
plan; and he hasn’t specified any real cuts save for a massive
gutting
of the defense budget.
Instead, Obama’s taken to holding fake press conferences
(they’ll be another one today) where he pretends to be a leader and
solemnly lectures Congress about the need for “action” and “getting
it done.”
Of course, Obama has been deliberately murky and coy about what,
exactly, it is that he wants “done.” He has, however, singled out
the so-called corporate jet tax loophole as something that must be
eliminated.
But as House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan told Fox News’
Greta Van Susteren, this “loophole” was something that Obama
himself reauthorized in
his 2009 “stimulus package,” which garnered not one House
Republican vote. It takes real chutzpa to blame your political
opponents for legislation that you yourself sponsored two short
years ago.
Moreover, Ryan explained, this Obama stimulus tax policy (read:
accelerated depreciation) applies not only to “corporate jets,” but
to “lots of things,” including airplanes.
More tellingly, said Ryan, this one particular issue, the
so-called corporate jet tax loophole, “never came up in our debt
negotiations. It never came up in [our] discussions. The first time
I heard about a corporate jet [tax] loophole — which was in his
stimulus package —was when he mentioned it six times in a press
conference.”
Of course, it’s not surprising that the first and only time
Obama ever mentioned this “loophole” was in a press conference.
Obama’s focused on reelection, not debt reduction. He’s playing for
the cameras, not fiscal probity. He’s trying to win politically,
not govern honestly or effectively.
Indeed, as Charles Krauthammer
observes in today’s Washington Post, the president
could not be “more political.
It’s like his Afghan surge wind-down date. September 2012 has no
relation to any military reality on the ground. It is designed
solely to position Obama favorably going into the last weeks of his
reelection campaign.
What should congressional Republicans do? “Call Obama’s bluff,”
says Krauthammer:
The Republican House should immediately pass a short-term
debt-ceiling hike of $500 billion containing $500 billion in budget
cuts. That would give us about five months to work on something
larger…
Will the Democratic Senate or the Democratic president refuse
this offer and allow the country to default - with all the
cataclysmic consequences that the Democrats have been warning about
for months - because Obama insists on a deal that is 10 months and
seven days longer?
That’s indefensible and transparently self-serving. Dare the
president to make that case. Dare him to veto — or the Democratic
Senate to block — a short-term debt-limit increase.
In other words, stop playing footsie with the president. Demand
that he make good on his rhetoric.
