from the press release: "The political brinksmanship of recent months highlights what we see as America's governance and policymaking becoming less stable, less effective, and less predictable than what we previously believed. "
There has been a complete lack of leadership from the Congressional Democrats on this issue. They haven't produced a budget plan in nearly three years, while borrowing 40 cents of every dollar spent during that time. I'm not a partisan-- George Bush's runaway spending contributed a great deal to the current predicament. But the basic Congressional oversight and operating under a budget hasn't happened the last couple…
Uh, you are merely parroting inaccurate GOP talking points, and I think we can be a little more accurate than that here.
First of all, the House and Senate easily passed Obama’s first budget on the president’s 100th day in office. That budget measure, however, did not include a single GOP vote, a harbinger of the lack of bipartisanship to come. From 2009 to January 2011, Republicans forced more than 90 “cloture” votes, which require 60 senators to agree to limit debate (ie stop a filibuster) on a measure.
Pretending that there was no Democrat "budget plan" for 2010 is disingenuous at best. Ongoing Democrat "plans" were continuously on the docket:
http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi-bin/getdoc.cgi?dbname=11...
Democrats did not have anything like a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate, and Republican Senators were quite open with their threat to filibuster any legislation until the “Bush-tax cuts” were extended.
http://www.nationaljournal.com/congress/gop-will-filibuster-...
"We write to inform you that we will not agree to invoke cloture on the motion to proceed to any legislative item until the Senate has acted to fund the government and we have prevented the tax increase that is currently awaiting all American taxpayers,” said the letter, which was sent to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid this morning."
“The true effect of this letter is to prevent the Senate from acting on many important issues that have bipartisan support,” Reid said this morning on the Senate floor. He said the letter codifies a GOP strategy of delaying action “on critical matters, then blaming the Democrats for not addressing the needs of the American people. Very cynical, but very obvious, very transparent.”
And imagine that, here we are in 2011....
Of course, filibuster has been used by both parties, but these tactics by Republicans accelerated drastically when Dems took over Congress late in Bush's presidency. As even the conservative American Enterprise Institute noted, Republican filibusters were used increasingly to obstruct legislation:
http://tpmdc.talkingpointsmemo.com/2010/01/the-rise-of-clotu...
"It is the most striking in history," American Enterprise Institute resident scholar Norm Ornstein told TPM.
"What happened, Ornstein says, is that during the last two years of President George W. Bush's second term, Republicans offered "no initiatives to speak of."
"The initiatives were coming from the Democrats, and the Republicans wanted to kill 'em, or slow things down. Republican filibuster threats, Ornstein said, were "like throwing molasses in the road."
"Still, Ornstein largely attributes the stark rise in cloture motions in the 110th Congress to Republican delay and obstruction tactics."
