Storified by Brian Empric· Sat, Mar 30 2013 17:02:02
Since February 2009 when Obama held a so-called Fiscal Responsibility Summit at the White House and our debt was $10.8 trillion, he’s added another $6 trillion to the amount that we and our children will have to repay, while reneging on his commitment back then to take responsibility “right now, in this administration…”
“Let's say your car is on cruise control at 100 miles per hour, and there's a brick wall in the distance. The responsible course of action would be to slow down gradually and turn the car so it's no longer pointed toward the brick wall. But if President Obama were driving the way he conducts fiscal policy, he'd be lowering the speed to 98 miles per hour and continuing on the same trajectory -- simply assuming he'd be able to slam on the brakes right before impact.”
“As with past financial crises, there are always voices warning about the inevitable but others who want to keep dancing until the music stops… There are several problems with waiting for an actual crisis to hit before taking action. To start, it limits the range of options available to lawmakers and results in ugly policy…”
“Emergency measures are likely to be much more disruptive to the economy and to people's lives. As the Congressional Budget Office wrote last month, ‘Deciding now what policy changes to make to resolve that long-term imbalance would allow for gradual implementation, which would give households, businesses, and state and local governments time to plan and adjust their behavior.’ It's also fairer to spread the policy changes among multiple generations, rather than imposing more drastic measures on a future generation.”
“How can anyone take President Obama seriously when he tells us our national debt is no big deal? Well, we have to take him seriously, because, unserious thinking or not, he has serious power, including the power to obstruct progress on reducing the debt.”
“The enormity of our annual interest payments on the debt alone renders Obama's dismissiveness about the debt surreal.”
“House Speaker John Boehner framed the problem quite accurately when he summarized the parties' respective positions. ‘Republicans want to balance the budget. The president doesn't,’ said Boehner. ‘Republicans want to solve our long-term debt problem. The president doesn't. We want to unlock our energy resources to put more Americans back to work. The president doesn't.’”
“Republicans need to launch a 24/7 public campaign blitz explaining Paul Ryan's new budget, which is based on real and specific numbers and proposes to balance the budget in 10 years and make structural changes to our entitlement programs to put them on a sustainable path.
“Democrats and liberal journalists are already out in force, savaging Ryan and the other Republicans -- again -- for their good faith effort to save the nation from a Grecian-style bankruptcy.
“I am convinced that if the Republicans will strike back with as much fervor as Obama constantly hits them and take their winning case to the people, the people will finally learn the truth: that Ryan's plan would not throw seniors or the poor under the bus and is, in fact, their best chance for the future and certainly the best hope currently on the table to restore America's solvency.”
“President Barack Obama on Monday nominated Tom Perez, head of the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, as labor secretary - a job that would give him a key role in the administration's efforts to raise the minimum wage and reform immigration laws.”
“Obama urged the Senate to confirm Perez quickly. He said he would be an integral part of his economic team as the administration works with Congress to try to overhaul immigration laws to give the country's 11 million illegal immigrants a pathway to citizenship.”
“Republican Senator Jeff Sessions of Alabama called Perez ‘the wrong man for this job’ and criticized him for being too aggressive helping undocumented immigrants find work as part of an advocacy group called Casa de Maryland.”
“Senator David Vitter, a Republican from Louisiana, said he would block Perez's nomination until the Justice Department answered questions about enforcement of the National Voter Registration Act in his state.
“Charles Grassley of Iowa, the top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee, said he was concerned about Perez's role in persuading the city of St. Paul, Minnesota, to withdraw a Fair Housing Act case from the U.S. Supreme Court last year.”
“No matter what progress Republicans may make in electoral politics over the coming years, it will be difficult to roll back the steady march of liberalism that has taken place inside our cultural, bureaucratic and legal institutions -- from academia to regulatory agencies to the Department of Justice -- but we have to try.”
“Radical liberals are characteristically activists, strategists and organizers. Their plan to infiltrate and dominate academia was hardly spontaneous, and its effects have hardly been sporadic… The same phenomenon occurs throughout the nation's regulatory bureaucracies. Liberals have managed to place so many ideologically charged people inside powerful administrative agencies, such as the Environmental Protection Agency, that these institutions tend to be radicalized from the bottom up.”
“They don't have the same reverence for the Constitution and the rule of law as conservatives. They view things through an ideological prism and act in deference to their ideology and their political ends more than their conservative counterparts. They see themselves as activist agents for change, as crusaders with the lofty goal of advancing an agenda so morally superior that they don't think twice about bending and twisting rules and selectively interpreting laws and regulations to serve their agenda.”
“We have to do a better job of exposing radicals and preventing them from overthrowing our constitutional guarantees from inside our government…”
“He’s done it with a package of tools, some of which date to George Washington and some invented in the modern era of an increasingly powerful presidency. And he’s done it with a frequency that belies his original campaign criticisms of predecessor George W. Bush, invites criticisms that he’s bypassing the checks and balances of Congress and the courts, and whets the appetite of liberal activists who want him to do even more to advance their goals.”
“Arguably more than any other president in modern history, he’s using executive actions, primarily orders, to bypass or pressure a Congress where the opposition Republicans can block any proposal.”
“Presidents since George Washington have signed executive orders, an oft-overlooked power not explicitly defined in the Constitution. More than half of all executive orders in the nation’s history – nearly 14,000 – have been issued since 1933.”
“Most presidents in recent history generally have issued a few hundred orders, and hundreds more memorandums and directives… But, experts say, Obama’s actions are more noticeable because as a candidate he was critical of Bush’s use of power. In particular, he singled out his predecessor’s use of signing statements, documents issued when a president signs a bill that clarifies his understanding of the law.”
“In his first two years in the White House, when fellow Democrats controlled Capitol Hill, Obama largely worked through the regular legislative process to try to achieve his domestic agenda. His biggest achievements – including a federal health care overhaul and a stimulus package designed to boost the economy –came about with little or no Republican support.
“But Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010, making the task of passing legislation all the more difficult for a man with a detached personality who doesn’t relish schmoozing with lawmakers…”
“’The president looks more and more like a king that the Constitution was designed to replace,’ Sen. Charles Grassley, R-Iowa, said on the Senate floor last year.”
“The plagiarist with the slow-grow hair plugs and the chipmunk fake teeth and the made-up stories about heroics on the football field who quietly won five student draft deferments during the Vietnam War really did become vice president…”
“[W]underboy Joey, despite his hardscrabble Scranton roots and spectacular work ethic (he did hold an actual job for some 18 months before going on the government dole 43 years ago) will not grow up to be the president of the United States. He’s already tried twice, in 1988 and again in 2008 (the latter after giving voters a full generation to forget why they didn’t like him the first time around).”
“The chatter started right around the time then-Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton got sick, fell down, bumped her head and disappeared for six weeks… Suddenly, all this talk swirled that Joey was going to run in 2016, you know, pick up the mantle of his mental mentor and try to see if he could top the $10 trillion in debt his boss is on pace to rack up…”
“At 70 years old, the Gaffe Machine won’t have time to wait another 20 years so America can forget all the stupid things he says and does…”
“This week brings more to pile onto the horror that the working-man’s vice president charges rent to the Secret Service to use a cottage adjacent to his waterfront home in Wilmington, Del. He and his entourage spent $460,000 for a single night in London earlier this year. And they spent another $585,000 for a night at a five-star hotel in Paris. The stays came amid the crisis in Washington over the budget.
“What’s more, he flies to Delaware nearly every weekend — first from his taxpayer-funded home in Washington on a chopper to an Air Force base, then on Air Force Two. The weekly jaunts have cost Americans more than $4 million so far (according to an article on the Newsmax website).”
Storified by Brian Empric · Mon, Sep 03 2012 12:45:03
