I’ve rarely been as annoyed with the Obama administration as I am right now. Watching his weekly address this morning basically curdled my stomach. I mean, Jesus, please don’t talk about the stupidity of the sequester and the inanity of trying to fix it with patches and band-aids when you have just let Congress head for the airports after voting to end airport delays.
I know the president is busy with Syria and Boston and Texas and a hundred other pressing issues, but the administration totally dropped the ball this week by not having a strategy for the Democrats in Congress to execute.
The entire point of sequestration is that it is so awful that the Republicans will eventually concede that that have to make concessions that they don’t want to make. Yet, when the pain finally got to the point that it was affecting Republican lawmakers directly by threatening to shorten their vacations with delays at the airports, the Democrats raced to provide a band-aid. The White House appears to believe that a veto would have been promptly overridden, splitting the Democrats and handing the Republicans a giant victory. That’s probably true, but only because the Democrats in Congress didn’t fight on the front-end.
They never, ever, ever should have allowed a FAA patch to land on the president’s desk without patches for Head Start and emergency housing and long-term unemployment. If we can’t force a deal, we can at least help the neediest people at the same time that we are helping air travelers.
Forcing people to languish at airports is bad politics in the short-term, but so is denying the people of the Mid-Atlantic disaster relief for weeks after Superstorm Sandy. It’s precisely because people would have been so angry that the Republicans would have felt immense pressure to fix the problem under any available terms.
If you are just going to fix all the things in the sequester that aggravate rich people, you will never fix this and the poor will bear the entire brunt of the pain.
I am angry.
