Senate Democrats Achieve a New Standard of Irresponsibility

The Senate voted on five budgets today, at the insistence of Republican senators. The result was revealing: no Senate Democrat voted in favor of any budget. This is consistent, of course, with the fact that the Democrat-led Senate has refused to adopt a budget, in violation of federal law, for the last three years. Still, it is a little shocking to see that not a single Democrat was willing to vote in favor of any budget, even the most irresponsible.

President Obama’s budget fared the worst; it lost, 99-0. This means that the presidents FY 2013 budget has now been rejected by the House and Senate by a combined vote of 513-0. Earlier today, as Paul noted in a post a little while ago, Obama demanded a “serious bipartisan approach” to the nation’s budgetary crisis. Bipartisan? He can’t even get a single Democrat to support his radically irresponsible proposals.

Four different Republican budgets were taken up by the Senate. The House budget (commonly referred to as the Ryan budget) was voted down 41-58. The vote on Pat Toomey’s budget was 42-47; the vote on Rand Paul’s budget was 16-83; and the vote on Mike Lee’s budget was 17-82. The common denominator was that no Democrat had the courage to vote for any of them.

Has an American political party ever been so irresponsible? It is hard to think of an equally craven precedent. Today Jeff Sessions said:

Today, before the whole nation, the majority party running the Senate effectively declared that as long as they’re in charge this country will not have a budget.

Their message is simple: Send Washington more money. Don’t ask us what we’ll do with it. They’re determined to avoid public accountability as our nation spends its way to financial disaster.

That is a fair assessment. Fortunately, however, there is a good chance that in January, we will have a new Senate Majority Leader–not to mention a new president–and the country will have a budget.

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