Given that President Obama robotically chanted “Pass this bill right away!” seventeen times during his rollout speech last week, you would think there was actually a bill that could be passed right away. You would be wrong.
That’s a little odd, isn’t it? Obama has provided absolutely no specific proposals since his disastrous budget flop back in February. He gives a lot of speeches and makes many demands, but never anything on paper with numbers and footnotes and such. The director of the Congressional Budget Office was moved to note sarcastically that “we don’t score speeches.”
So here comes the “American Jobs Act,” the legislation that will fix America. Its launch was delayed until after Obama could finish his Martha’s Vineyard vacation, plus some time at Camp David to recover from the vacation. It’s an expensive new “stimulus” bill – the price tag increases literally every time Obama talks about it, but we’re currently holding at about $450 billion – dropped on a public that has grown mightily sick and tired of Obama spending sprees, and wants to know what he did with the last couple of trillion dollars he grabbed, besides throwing money at “green jobs” disasters owned by big Democrat contributors. Swarms of FBI agents were buzzing around the rotting corpse of Solyndra even as Obama gave his big speech. And yet… he thought he could just demand an open-ended commitment to a bill that wasn’t even written yet?
White House spokesman Jay Carney was asked about this on Friday:
Q Jay, how does the President expect Congress to act on the bill now if the pay-fors aren’t going to be decided until late November, if at all?
MR. CARNEY: I think you misunderstood, Julie. The President will put a bill before Congress early next week - the American Jobs Act - and it will contain the pay-fors in it.
Q But there’s no guarantee that that bill is going to pass.
MR. CARNEY: Well, right. But if the bill passes, it will pass with pay-fors.
Q So he wants Congress to pass as a package the jobs bill and the pay-fors?
MR. CARNEY: Yes. I mean, look - and let’s be clear. The reason why there is a link between the pay-fors and the proposals he’ll put forward to this Congress and the super committee on long-term deficit and debt control - because he’s asking the super committee to overshoot its target of $1.5 trillion in additional savings by the full cost of the Jobs Act to ensure that the American Jobs Act does not add a single dime to the deficit. So they’re linked.
Were you under the impression, at any time during the debt-ceiling debate, that the purpose of the Super Committee would be to find money for Obama’s big spending initiatives? If Obama had announced his intention to use it that way only 39 days previously, as the Budget Control Act of 2011 was being hotly debated by Congress, do you suppose it might have impacted the discussion?
Maybe Obama could steal a page from the gun-rights movement to produce a new slogan: “Budget Control Means Using Both Hands.” He could slap it on a bumper sticker between two fists full of dollar bills.
Barack Obama is the living, breathing, walking, talking vindication of everything the Tea Party believes. With great fanfare, Congress passed a “Budget Control Act” that will, at best, add $10 trillion to the national debt over the next decade… and the President who personally added more to the debt than all of our Presidents through Ronald Reagan, combined, pipes up a month later to say hey, before we get all carried away with this “spending cut” talk, I’ve got another half-trillion I’d like to blow, because you private-sector chumps need my guidance to get this economy moving again. Now stop complaining about the avalanche of job-killing regulations and trillions in health care cost I dumped on you. We’re not going to repeal any of that garbage, but we’ll force the taxpayers to spend hundreds of billions more giving you incentives, if you’ll hurry up and start hiring people before Election Day 2012. No, you can’t see the details, just pass this bill I’m going to present sometime next week, with funding to be worked out later!
According to the Associated Press, Obama will be sending some kind of actual legislation to Congress at some point today. Then he’ll start blowing millions of taxpayer dollars on travel across the country to push for passage of the bill, as part of an extensive advertising campaign:
Teachers, police officers, firefighters and others will join the president in the Rose Garden to call for passage, according to the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity ahead of the president's remarks.
The Democratic National Committee is launching a television ad campaign to boost support for Obama's plan.
The 30-second ads, which show portions of Obama's speech to Congress last week promoting his jobs package, will air in politically important states from Nevada to New Hampshire. The ads urge viewers to "Read it. Fight for it. ... Pass the President's Jobs Plan."
DNC spokesman Brad Woodhouse says the spots begin airing Monday and are the first round in an effort that will last several weeks.
It sounds like a lot of careful planning and preparation went into that ad campaign, from arranging for teachers and cops to travel to the Rose Garden and serve as props, through launching a national TV ad campaign. Too bad that level of planning didn’t go into preparing the actual bill. The President would have begun demanding passage last Wednesday if he had his way, and his office hasn’t produced anything concrete for seven months, but we’ll see something on paper today if we’re lucky. I don’t know why Congress hasn’t passed it already. Hasn’t this President proven that he can be blindly trusted with hundreds of billions of dollars, to create shovel-ready green jobs?
