Bob Woodward And The Truth of the Sequester

The first and foremost fact about the impending created crisis that is in fact not a crisis at all – the so-called Sequester – is that it will not result in true budget cuts as the political and media class are currently claiming. What it will do is cut the growth of proposed spending increases. In the Looking Glass world that is Washington, increasing anything by seven percent instead of a planned ten percent increase is presented as a dire three percent cut that will undoubtedly wind up starving children, allowing terrorists to board planes and leave Grandma out in street to fend for herself as she struggles with healthcare being denied.

This is all nonsense – the federal government, WITH the Sequester, will spend more money this year than last, with almost a trillion dollars of it unfunded.

The Sequester is scheduled to take effect this week and so the Madison Conservative will await its outcome before discussing the absolute absurdity of it.

However, it serves a useful purpose to understand the idiocy that led to this manufactured crisis, and who is telling the truth about its proposal and planning.

The President is claiming innocence and attempting to foist sole responsibility onto House Republicans. They should indeed shoulder some of the culpability in this nonsense, but the following column is from Bob Woodward of the Washington Post, and neither Woodward nor the Post can be accused of being biased against the administration. Woodward has clearly sourced and documented the reality of the Sequester nonsense, and his reporting is both telling and worrisome on the nature of truth in government from a President who still claims to have the most transparent administration in history.

He is at the least obfuscating – at the worst he is outright lying.

Neither option should be accepted by the American people.

Please read the entire column from Woodward, published February 22^nd in The Washington Post. To wit:

“What is the non-budget wonk to make of this? Who is responsible? What really happened?

The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

The president and Lew had this wrong. My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

Nabors has told others that they checked with the president before going to see Reid. A mandatory sequester was the only action-forcing mechanism they could devise. Nabors has said, “We didn’t actually think it would be that hard to convince them” — Reid and the Republicans — to adopt the sequester. “It really was the only thing we had. There was not a lot of other options left on the table.”

A majority of Republicans did vote for the Budget Control Act that summer, which included the sequester. Key Republican staffers said they didn’t even initially know what a sequester was — because the concept stemmed from the budget wars of the 1980s, when they were not in government.

At the Feb. 13 Senate Finance Committee hearing on Lew’s nomination to become Treasury secretary, Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) asked Lew about the account in my book: “Woodward credits you with originating the plan for sequestration. Was he right or wrong?”

“It’s a little more complicated than that,” Lew responded, “and even in his account, it was a little more complicated than that. We were in a negotiation where the failure would have meant the default of the government of the United States.”

“Did you make the suggestion?” Burr asked.

“Well, what I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences. And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”

In other words, yes.

But then Burr asked about the president’s statement during the presidential debate, that the Republicans originated it.

Lew, being a good lawyer and a loyal presidential adviser, then shifted to denial mode: “Senator, the demand for an enforcement mechanism was not something that the administration was pushing at that moment.”

That statement was not accurate.

On Tuesday, Obama appeared at the White House with a group of police officers and firefighters to denounce the sequester as a “meat-cleaver approach” that would jeopardize military readiness and investments in education, energy and readiness. He also said it would cost jobs. But, the president said, the substitute would have to include new revenue through tax reform.

At noon that same day, White House press secretary Jay Carney shifted position and accepted sequester paternity.

“The sequester was something that was discussed,” Carney said. Walking back the earlier statements, he added carefully, “and as has been reported, it was an idea that the White House put forward.”

This was an acknowledgment that the president and Lew had been wrong.

Why does this matter?

First, months of White House dissembling further eroded any semblance of trust between Obama and congressional Republicans. (The Republicans are by no means blameless and have had their own episodes of denial and bald-faced message management.)

Second, Lew testified during his confirmation hearing that the Republicans would not go along with new revenue in the portion of the deficit-reduction plan that became the sequester. Reinforcing Lew’s point, a senior White House official said Friday, “The sequester was an option we were forced to take because the Republicans would not do tax increases.”

In fact, the final deal reached between Vice President Biden and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) in 2011 included an agreement that there would be no tax increases in the sequester in exchange for what the president was insisting on: an agreement that the nation’s debt ceiling would be increased for 18 months, so Obama would not have to go through another such negotiation in 2012, when he was running for reelection.

So when the president asks that a substitute for the sequester include not just spending cuts but also new revenue, he is moving the goal posts. His call for a balanced approach is reasonable, and he makes a strong case that those in the top income brackets could and should pay more. But that was not the deal he made.”

The State of the Union Explicit Threat

President Obama delivered his State of the Union speech before a joint session of Congress this week, as provided by the Constitution. The pertinent section on this reads as follows:

“He shall from time to time give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union, and recommend to their Consideration such Measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient.”

The Madison Conservative would prefer that presidents follow the example set by President Thomas Jefferson; he submitted it in writing and left it at that. The television age has seemingly created the need to embellish the State of the Union speech and transform a constitutional requirement into a media event.

President Obama’s speech followed his inaugural address in that it laid out a set of progressive, liberal priorities for his second term. There are those of the political class and their media flacks who will debate the feasibility and practicality of his agenda and the plausibility of its chances for passage through a divided Congress.

There was, however, embedded within this speech a statement made that should give every American pause, for it belies the Presidents’ call for negotiation and bipartisanship. It carries with it as well a portending of a dangerous assault on the fundamental structure of a democratic republic designed as an equal tricameral form of government, with each third having very specific and purposeful responsibilities delineated in framework.

Contained within the portion of the speech that spoke to his call to address climate change, there was proffered this foreboding statement; it is chilling if the President of the United States actually means it.

To wit:

“I urge this Congress to pursue a bipartisan, market-based solution to climate change, like the one John McCain and Joe Lieberman worked on together a few years ago. But if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will. I will direct my Cabinet to come up with executive actions we can take, now and in the future, to reduce pollution, prepare our communities for the consequences of climate change, and speed the transition to more sustainable sources of energy.”

The telling phrase: “…if Congress won’t act soon to protect future generations, I will.”

The president does have the power of executive orders, but this goes beyond that. This is a threat that if legislative third of our government does not act in accordance with his wishes and choices, he will act upon what he believes is his sole prerogative. That is not democracy, that is not constitutional – that is tyranny.

This is not hyperbole or hysteria. The President has made clear that he will act if the Congress does not. Such a statement shows an absolute lack of understanding of the structure of American democratic self-rule. The president may not act unilaterally to affect legislation. It is odd that the speech included this line within the context of climate change, but it will no doubt be used to control issues well beyond that narrow focus. The president has already affected the role of government in mandating health care insurance be required of the citizenry – the first step towards declaring that any form of personal choice can fall under the guise of being unhealthy and thus be regulated by the government. The debate on concussions in the NFL is a harbinger of this potential threat to individual freedom and personal choice. Football violence is unhealthy; therefore the government has the right to legislate all such activity.

Under the umbrella of climate change, industry and business will be claimed as negatively affecting climate change; that factory is emitting greenhouse gases, so the government must step in and legislate it out of business.

This is a chilling prospect, borne of a single individual believing he has the sole authority to act if the representatives of a free people elected to government do not act as that singular person demands.

Democracy requires forever vigilance, for all tyranny requires to take root is for good people to remain silent.

Dr. Benjamin Carson - 2-10-2013

It is not often that the Madison Conservative will defer its platform to another voice, but given the amazing clarity presented in the below linked speech, it has been decided to present this clip to as many American citizens as possible.

The speaker has been criticized for making his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast, as if it were in some manner an act of disrespect to the event in general, and to President Obama in particular.

The President does on occasion appear to be uncomfortable with the absolute power of the arguments presented within the speech.

The Madison Conservative believes that the speaker was absolutely correct in his decision to present his speech when and how he did. He was in no way disrespectful to either the event or the President.

It is possible that the hue and cry over the attempted perceived portrayal of disrespect has more to do with the clarity of vision and intelligence of discourse that was presented and the inherent diversion from the accepted presentation of reality by the political class and their media sycophants.

It is requested that you take the thirty or so minutes to listen to this speech; it is as accurate a distillation of what we are told is too difficult to handle into what is actually very much possible.

The orator is Dr. Benjamin Carson, pediatric neurosurgeon at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He is no lightweight, by any measure.

The Madison Conservative will return next week to discuss the Presidents’ State of the Union speech this coming Tuesday.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyyHegP255g

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Liberalism By Way of Football

Given that today (February 3^rd) was Super Bowl Sunday – Congratulations Ravens! - it is perhaps appropriate to see the NFL as an exemplar of the clear demarcation between liberalism and conservatism. Please note that liberalism and conservatism in this context have nothing to do with the mostly interchangeable political parties of Democrat and Republican.

To wit:

There is currently running rampant a debate over the rate and severity of concussions and other head traumas in professional football, and by association collegiate, high school and every other organized football association. This is a proper and necessary debate and should be held within the confines of a privately held concern, the aforementioned NFL. The NFL is not a public organization – it is not a part of government or under its jurisdiction.

Couple that fact with President Obamas’ inauguration speech, which was by both impartial and partisan review a declaration of his unabashed liberal policies and intentions for his second term.

Taken together and in the context of this philosophical treatise, one must consider the intent of comments made by President Obama when queried about his opinions on the football injury debate in a soon to be released article in the New Republic.

The three following excerpts are both telling of the liberal ethos and of great concern to those who believe the government to be ‘of the people, by the people and for the people’.

To wit:

“I'm a big football fan, but I have to tell you if I had a son, I'd have to think long and hard before I let him play football,"

The scope of that statement is an almost perfect embodiment of liberalism – what is good for you might not be good for me, so we may have to change it to meet my standards. By definition, this statement indicates that those involved in the largest sport franchise, a private corporation, is unable to properly address workplace concerns on its own, so the government needs to step in and help the defenseless millionaires participating in a private endeavor. It is far different to express concern from a detached government perspective as opposed to injecting oneself into such a situation on such a personal level. The NFL is more than capable to address its own issues. As President Reagan fondly noted, “the nine most terrifying words are ‘I am from the government and here to help’” A sane voice of conservatism.

The next quote from the forthcoming article:

"And I think that those of us who love the sport are going to have to wrestle with the fact that it will probably change gradually to try to reduce some of the violence,"

Again, the misconstruction of sport as unstructured violence. Even the most casual citizen understands that football is a contact sport. Those who choose to play it do so of their own free volition. This statement seems to equate professional sport with the gladiatorial games of ancient Rome, where victims were killed for sport. To make this statement is to tell the American sports fan that they are thirsty for blood. The supposition made by the President is ridiculous and insulting enough, yet the liberal mindset is intent on removing all delineations of success in favor of watering everything down to a warped premise of ‘fairness’. There needs to be a winner and a loser in the Super Bowl. There is not a tie and both sides awarded the trophy because they tried their best and no one wished to hurt anyone’s feelings. This is a dangerous mindset to have for those in authority – once you try to legislate sport, where does it end? Should race cars be limited to only speeds of 40 miles per hour to minimize crashes? And by setting a top speed limit attainable by all, everyone would have a ‘fair’ chance to win. By attempting to equalize outcome, what is actually happening is the distillation of excellence. America is nothing if not the pursuit of individual excellence.

The final excerpted quote:

“In some cases, that may make it a little bit less exciting, but it will be a whole lot better for the players, and those of us who are fans maybe won't have to examine our consciences quite as much.”

This comment is beyond both bizarre and troubling. President Obama may be worried about the overall safety issues at the forefront of the current football concussion debate, but exactly why does he believe that it rises to the level of a point of personal morality? Football fans are like every other sports fan – they want their team to win, but not at the expense of injuring the opposition. The statement from the President, presented this way, can only mean that government is now the sole arbiter of how the citizenry should think. If you enjoy football and its inherent physicality, than of course there is a defect in your thinking – your conscience is out of sorts. One could presume then that the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare) would kick in and your errant thinking would be documented and treated by the government.

This is exactly why the government, especially the President, must be mindful of their use of the bully pulpit. Even with an inescapable liberal agenda, the questions must be asked on just how far that agenda will go to ‘help’ and ‘correct’ the conscience  of a nation.

Democracy demands eternal vigilance, on and