Freedom Line Blog

The Hill provides the text of a letter sent by the White House Office of Management and Budget to House Budget Chairman Paul Ryan (R-WI).

In it, the OMB’s Deputy Director for Management blames the late resolution of the “fiscal cliff” negotiations for causing the White House to violate the law by missing the February 4 deadline for submitting a budget to Congress.

But as The Hill notes, that excuse is nonsense when considered in light of the Obama Administration’s record on budgets:

Under the law, President Obama must submit a budget by the first Monday in February, but he has met the deadline only once. The annual budget submission is supposed to start a congressional budgeting process, but that has also broken down. The Senate last passed a budget resolution in 2009.

Left out of that tidy little summation is the fact that the House Republicans have never failed to pass a budget resolution during the entire time Obama has been president.

The failure of Washington to “work” in the Obama Era is not a failure of substance; both parties are relatively clear about their policy visions.  What’s grinding the system to a halt is the liberal disregard of legal procedures like statutorily defined deadlines.  Throw out the rules, and suddenly no one knows how to play the game.  As I said last week, unless the budget process is amended to enact meaningful punishment on parties who violate it, nothing else is likely to change.