Tweet of the Week: On Budgets and Budget Directors

This week attention has been focused on President Obama’s pick of Jacob Lew to replace outgoing Peter Orszag as Director of the Office of Management and Budget. While Washington focuses on his record and qualifications, Senator John Cornyn (R-TX) tried to focus attention back on the failure of Congress to pass a real budget this year, saying in a tweet yesterday:

As we discussed earlier this month, in shield their members for a politically unpopular vote, liberals in Congress chose instead to pass a “budget enforcement resolution”.  As we explained at the time, this is an unprecedented move.

Make no mistake: This is not a true budget. All future federal spending and revenue projections, which would normally be included in an actual budget resolution, are conspicuously absent in what was passed last night.

This has never happened. The House of Representatives has passed a budget resolution in every single year since the modern budget process was established in 1974—until now.

The budget resolution functions as the budget of the Congress, setting both federal spending and revenue levels for the next five fiscal years. The “budget enforcement resolution” differs greatly in that it covers only a single year and completely ignores both mandatory spending and revenue.

But unfortunately for these politicians, the American people see through this smoke and mirrors. A Rasmussen poll released this week shows that only 31% of Americans feel that we are headed in the right direction, due in no small part to abdication of leadership like this latest budget gimmick.