During the summer 2011 debt ceiling battle, President Obama’s White House came up with the idea of sequestration. It is a mechanism designed to trigger automatic spending cuts in the event that a congressional “super committee” couldn’t agree to at least $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction.

Congress passed the White House proposal, and Obama signed it into law. And in November 2011, Obama vowed, “I will veto any effort to get rid of those automatic spending cuts to domestic and defense spending. There will be no easy offramps on this one.”