As I write, Nancy Pelosi is on CNN being interviewed by Candy Crowley. It was background noise for me until the phrase “we inherited this mess from the Bush Administration” reached my ear. For Democrats these days, the phrase has replaced “hello” and “good-bye.”
Last night I discovered, Slate, an on-line magazine owned by the Washington Post. I found comfort in a post in their blog area, “the Fray.” There I discovered the best summary of why Obama cannot keep claiming that he inherited a budgetary mess from the Bush Administration:
A very important civics lesson re-remembered. The Washington Post babbled again today about Obama inheriting a huge deficit from Bush, blah blah blah. Amazingly enough, a lot of people swallow this nonsense. So once more, a short civics lesson. Budgets do not come from the White House. They come from Congress, and the party that controlled Congress since January 2007 is the Democrat Party. They controlled the budget process for FY 2008 and FY 2009, as well as FY 2010 and FY 2011. In that first year, they had to contend with George Bush, which caused them to compromise on spending, when Bush somewhat belatedly got tough on spending increases. For FY 2009, though, Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid bypassed George Bush entirely, by continuously passing resolutions to keep government running until Barack Obama could take office. At that time, they passed a massive omnibus spending bill to complete the FY 2009 budgets.
And where was Barack Obama during this time? He was a member of that very Congress that passed all of these massive spending bills, and he later signed the omnibus bill as President to complete FY 2009.[Slate, The Fray]
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