The Budget

Floor Speech

Mr. McCONNELL. Mr. President, President Obama released a budget today that isn't really a budget at all. It is a campaign document. The President's goal isn't to solve our problems but to ignore them for another year, which will only ensure they get even worse. Once again, the President is shirking his responsibility to lead by using this budget to divide us.

The game plan is perfectly clear. Rather than reach out to Congress to craft a consensus budget, the President will take this budget on the road, as he did today, and talk about the parts he thinks audiences will like. What he will not say is that it is bad for job creation, bad for seniors, and it will make the economy worse.

The President's budget is bad for jobs because it includes the biggest tax hike in history and continues policies such as the Democrats' health care law that is making it harder for small businesses to hire.

A little more than a year ago, the President extended current tax rates because he thought raising them would be bad for jobs. Today he will call for raising them anyway because he thinks it is good for him.

The President's budget is bad for our seniors because it doesn't protect the security of Medicare and Social Security and assures those programs keep careening toward insolvency.

The President's budget is bad for our country's economic security because yet again the President failed to take the prime opportunity this budget provides to address the Nation's $15 trillion debt.

Contrary to the President's claims out on the road, this budget is literally loaded with deficit reduction gimmicks that would trigger an IRS audit for anybody else and make our current economic situation even worse.

Now, the President isn't going to mention any of those things, but Americans deserve to know the whole truth about this budget. They deserve to know why the President's own party doesn't want to vote on it and why his own top advisers are trying to deflect serious questions about what is really going on here.

Yesterday, the President's Chief of Staff said the reason this budget will not get anywhere in the Senate is because it would take 60 votes to pass--60 votes to pass--and the Democrats don't have that many votes on their own.

Well, I would suggest Mr. Lew review his Sunday briefing materials a little more closely next time. As someone who has run the Office of Management and Budget for two different Presidents, he knows as well as anybody in Washington a simple majority is all it takes to pass a budget resolution in the Senate, a simple majority. In other words, Democrats could pass this President's budget without a single Republican vote--not one.

The inconvenient truth that President Obama and his own top advisers don't want to admit is that this budget isn't going anywhere because the President's own party doesn't want to have anything whatsoever to do with it. Indeed, the majority leader in the Senate has already declared it ``dead on arrival.''

Now, Jack Lew knows this as well as I do, and the fact that he does proves beyond any doubt the President has no intention of this budget ever actually being implemented. If he can't even count on members of his own party to support it, who does he expect is going to support it?

The truth is, Democrats want to have it both ways. The President wants to be able to take his budget around the country to talk about the parts of it he thinks people will like, and Democrats in Congress want to be able to avoid a vote on it because it is so damaging for job creation and seniors and the economy.

Well, if anybody wants to know what a failure of leadership looks like, this is it. This is it. Three years ago, President Obama promised to cut the Federal deficit in half by the end of his first term. He hasn't even come close. Here he is once again proposing the same failed policies that have prolonged this economic crisis well into the President's fourth year in office. After the national debt increased under his watch by more than 40 percent, he is still throwing good money after bad. He is still spending money we don't have on things we don't need. He still refuses to lead.

Democrats in Congress have been more than happy to enable him. They haven't passed a budget of their own in 3 years, and all indications are they will not pass one this year either--a failure of congressional leadership that will surely go down in history. At this point, nothing seems capable of rousing this President to action. Every day we hear the alarm bells sounding from across the Atlantic. It doesn't seem to phase him. Every day we hear the warnings from experts and economists that our fiscal situation is unsustainable.

Just a few months ago, the unthinkable happened when America's credit rating was actually lowered for the first time in history.

What is this President's response? A budget he knows even his own party will not support. That is his response to this $15 trillion debt. So this is a charade--a charade. The only question is when this President's own refusal to lead will catch up to all the rest of us.

I yield the floor.

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