Obama’s new Chief of Staff Jack Lew made the rounds Sunday, February 12. And he lied to every single mainstream media outlet that would welcome his lies. And not ONE network host challenged his Big Lie.
Jack Lew has been around. He is an experienced Washington insider who understands the rules of the political process. He actually served twice as Bill Clinton’s budget director. So to say he made a “misstatement” is simply a lie. Jack Lew tried to falsely demonize the Republican Party for the pathetic and abject failure of the Democrat Party to pass ANY budget for well over a thousand days (that’s nearly three years).
This was clearly no accident. Lew said the same totally false thing again and again on the morning political talk programs. As Politifact CLEARLY points out:
Most business in the Senate is subject to filibustering — that is, actions, or even just threats, to talk a bill to death. Filibusters can be overcome by what’s known as a “cloture” vote that shuts off debate and moves a measure toward final consideration. For the Senate to agree to cloture requires 60 votes — a high threshold that many Senate majorities are unable to muster on controversial votes (and, increasingly, even on relatively uncontroversial votes).
However, the filibuster cannot be used to block a budget resolution. That’s because the Budget Act sets out a specific amount of time for debate in the Senate — 50 hours. If a specific amount of debate time is enshrined in the controlling statute, the filibuster is moot. So a simple majority — not 60 votes — is all that’s required to pass a budget resolution.
Indeed, passing a budget resolution by at least 60 votes has become increasingly rare in recent years, according to CRS data. Since 1994, the Senate vote has exceeded that vote threshold just three times, either in the initial vote or on a subsequent vote in which lawmakers consider an identical House-Senate version of the resolution.
More common in recent years are votes where 51 was enough to prevail. In 2009, the Senate even passed the final budget resolution by a 48-45 margin.
“The budget resolution vote is always a partisan affair, and rarely does it gain any minority party support,” said Steve Ellis, a vice president at Taxpayers for Common Sense.
So Lew is clearly wrong to say that “you can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes.” As a longtime senior official at OMB and other federal agencies, he should have known better.
Here are Obama Chief of Staff Jack Lew’s own lying words on two separate programs:
From NBC‘s Meet the Press, Sunday, February 12, 2012:
MR. GREGORY: So the leadership deficit in Washington has had an impact on what business does in America and certainly our economic outlook. Here’s a stat that a lot of people may not know, but it’s pretty striking. The number of days since Senate Democrats passed a budget is 1,019. Can you just explain as a former budget director, how do you fund the government when there’s no budget?
MR. LEW: Well, you know, one of the things about the United States Senate that I think the American people have realized is that it takes 60, not 50 votes to pass something. And there has been Republican opposition to anything that Senate Democrats have tried to do. So it, it is a challenge in the United States Senate to pass legislation when there’s not that willingness to work together. Congress didn’t do a great job last year. It, it, it drove right to the edge of a cliff on occasion after occasion. I actually think it’s unfair to blame the United States Senate for that. A lot of that was because of the extreme, you know, conservative approach taken by House Republicans.
The same Jack Lew – the same guy who was a budget director TWICE for Bill Clinton and without question understood that he was lying – went on CNN‘s State of the Union that same day and said:
CROWLEY: I know we’ll want to talk about the tax hikes in a second, but I want to read for our viewers something that Senator Harry Reid, the Democratic majority leader in the U.S. Senate, who said, we do not need to bring a budget to the floor this year. It’s done. We don’t need to do it, talking about last year’s two-year agreement and saying that, you know, so it’s already done.
This budget, I can assure you and you know, because you’ve been in this town for a long time, is going to be attacked as a political document. This is a budget that promises 2 million more jobs if it’s passed, so that come September the president can go out there and say, well, if they’d only passed by budget, we’d have 2 million more jobs, but those darn Republicans are standing in my way, when, in fact, even the Democratic leader in the Senate says, you know what, we don’t need a budget.
LEW: Well, let’s be clear. What Senator Reid is talking about is a fairly narrow point. In order for the Senate to do its annual work on appropriation bills, they need to pass a certain piece of legislation which sets a limit. They did that last year. That’s what he’s talking about.
He’s not saying that they shouldn’t pass a budget. But we also need to be honest. You can’t pass a budget in the Senate of the United States without 60 votes, and you can’t get 60 votes without bipartisan support. So unless Republicans…
And, yes, we need to be honest. Which means we have to abolish the party of pathological liars, the Democrat Party. And to finish his interrupted sentence, unless Republicans grow a set of testicles and rise up and hold the Democrats responsible for all of their vicious lies, this nation is doomed.
You need 51 votes to pass a budget. The Democrat Party currently has 53 votes in the Senate. When Obama took over, they had a filibuster-proof Senate and they could have passed ANY budget they wanted.
I know, I know. That was the Republicans Party’s fault, too.
You need to understand something very important about the Democrats. They are the end result of a culture and a nation that is in pitiful decay and just about to implode. The Democrat Party is the result of God damn America.
Ancient man did not talk in terms of “rights.” They talked in terms of DUTIES. They talked in terms of their duties as human beings, as family members, as citizens of a state. And any society that fixates on “rights” and abandons the pervasive sense of duty is a society that is on the verge of perishing. And the Democrat Party is riding the death of America like a jockey urging his horse to a faster pace into hell.
Benjamin Franklin said, “When the people find that they can vote themselves money, that will herald the end of the republic.” And THAT is the Democrat Party: the party of the end of the republic.
For Democrats, their “rights” ALWAYS impose duty on somebody else. It’s my “right” to have a sex change operation, and it is the DUTY of religious conservatives to abandon their four thousand years of Judeo-Christian revelation and affirm my choice to sexually mutilate myself so I can live in my depraved life. And it is the DUTY of those same religious conservatives to pay for that depraved act of sexual mutilation. Women have a right to get birth control, abortion-causing drugs and sterilizations without any sort of restriction of any kind whatsoever. And the Catholic Church has the DUTY to forsake one thousand-five hundred YEARS of clearly defined religious tradition and start providing “access” because Barack Obama is greater than God. The messiah has spoken, so let it be written, so let it be done.
What is our real debt? It isn’t the trifling $16 trillion – $6 trillion of which was inflicted on us by Barack Obama alone in just three years – that we hear about. It is $211 TRILLION plus:
It’s those medium- and long-term debt problems that also worry economics professor Laurence J. Kotlikoff, who served as a senior economist on President Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He says the national debt, which the U.S. Treasury has accounted at about $14 trillion, is just the tip of the iceberg.
“We have all these unofficial debts that are massive compared to the official debt,” Kotlikoff tells David Greene, guest host of weekends on All Things Considered. “We’re focused just on the official debt, so we’re trying to balance the wrong books.”
Kotlikoff explains that America’s “unofficial” payment obligations — like Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid benefits — jack up the debt figure substantially.
“If you add up all the promises that have been made for spending obligations, including defense expenditures, and you subtract all the taxes that we expect to collect, the difference is $211 trillion. That’s the fiscal gap,” he says. “That’s our true indebtedness.”
Boston University economist Laurence Kotlikoff, to make it clear, is a noted economist. He is a research associate at the U.S. National Bureau of Economic Research. He is a former senior economist with then-president Ronald Reagan’s Council of Economic Advisers. He has served as a consultant with governments around the world. And he wrote about this issue of America’s true debt in a peer-reviewed journal of the International Monetary Fund (September, 2010). This isn’t a joke. This is our reality.
And which party inflicted this ridiculously unpayable debt??? Which party inflicted the Social Security Ponzi scheme on us when there were in fact far better privatized equivalents at the time which would have been better funded and paid out better benefits? Which party took over sixty percent of our health care system with a government socialist scheme that is going to be completely BANKRUPT by 2017 at the latest???
Which political party is completely responsible for these depraved government takeovers that will collapse and thus murder millions of elderly people whose only crime was being forced by the Democrat Party to pay into the Democrat Party’s boondoggle?
I think I’ve already hinted at the answer: the Democrat Party.
Democrats want to demonize Reagan and Bush for all the debt. As I’ve already pointed out, Barack Obama has already vastly outspent George W. Bush in less than half the time. But that debt is NOTHING compared to the TWO HUNDRED TRILLION DOLLARS that Democrats are one hundred percent responsible for.
What does Obama’s personal stooge do when confronted by the FACT that his party has not bothered to pass a budget of any kind of for 1,019 days (that is 1,022 days now) according to NBC?
He deceitfully and falsely demonizes Republicans, of course.
Which is to say that the same party from hell that constantly creates new “rights” that OTHER PEOPLE must pay for is likewise the party from hell that always makes OTHER PEOPLE responsible for the hell that they create.
What’s going to be the end of the party of lies???
One day, very soon, after the collapse that the Democrat Party will have imposed upon the United States and therefore the world that has depended on the strength and integrity of the United States for a century, a figure will emerge that the Book of Daniel warned us about nearly three thousand years ago and the Book of Revelation warned us about nearly two thousand years ago. Democrats don’t give a damn; they despise the Bible and openly mock it as a matter of routine.
Barack Obama is even now shaping the Middle East for the last days and the coming of this dictator whom the Bible rightly foretold would be “the beast.” Just as Obama is even now shaping the United States – the only nation that has kept Israel from facing a second Holocaust even worse than the last one – for collapse.
Barack Obama has been repeatedly proclaimed as the “messiah” by the political left. He’s no such thing; he’s the useful idiot of the Antichrist, of the coming beast who will come riding in on his white horse to save the day after Obama has imploded the economy of the only country on earth that would have resisted him.
When this beast comes, he will be the Democrat Party’s wet dream. He will be the big government “global unifier” that they’ve always dreamed of. Democrats will acclaim the Antichrist. They will vote for him. They will take his mark. And they will burn in hell for a well-deserved eternity of suffering for their crimes against the truth.