President Obama won’t call it a campaign stop, but his visit to the swing state of Pennsylvania today featured an array of attacks on Republicans and praise for Democrats, especially the former Congressman now running for the Pennyslvania Attorney General’s office.
Obama opened his speech on changes to the education program, Head Start, with the usual acknowledgement of present elected officials, but then singled out for praise Patrick Murphy, a Democratic candidate for Attorney General. “One of my favorite former members of Congress who I think is going to be doing big things here in Pennsylvania is here as well,” Obama said in an apparent allusion to the Attorney General election. “I guess I can’t call you Congressman, huh? That’s all right? Congressman Murphy!” he said, finally identifying the man to the audience.
And then Obama commenced with an excoriation of the Republicans who want to cut government spending. “The Republicans in Washington have been trying to gut our investments in education,” Obama said. “Their argument is that we don’t have the money,” he added, before explaining that he wants to pay for the education spending with tax increases on millionaires.
Tax increases to pay for new spending don’t address the fundamental issue of the lack of money. Public debt due to government spending has doubled since September 2007. President Bush gets the blame for the $787 billion bank bailouts in 2008, that’s only a part of the $5 trillion increase over that four-year period.
To conclude his summary of the executive action he’s taking to change Head Start, Obama threw a sharp elbow at Congress. “Of course, there’s no substitute for Congress doing its job,” he said. He added moments later that “if Congress continues to stand only for dysfunction and delay, then I’m going to move ahead without them.”
That critique of congressional inaction parallels an incredibly disingenuous comment by Vice President Joe Biden during the Weekly Address last Saturday. “If the Republican Congress won’t join us,” Biden said, “we’re going to continue to act on our own to make the changes that we can to bring relief to middle-class families and those aspiring to get in the middle class.”
Biden referred to Congress as “Republican Congress,” pretending for the moment that Democrats do not control the U.S. Senate. If Obama and Biden really want Congress to “do its job,” they might tell Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., to prioritize the Senate’s legal responsibility to pass a budget, which the Senate has ignored for over 900 days.
Reid believes passing a budget would be “foolish” — something about the American people knowing how much Senate Democrats plan to spend this year doesn’t seem prudent to the Senate Majority Leader.
If Obama would stop taking shots at Republicans long enough to tell the Senate to do its job, then we might have an honest and fruitful debate about what programs to cut, what to pay for, and what programs merit raising taxes to fund.
