Democrats questions Republicans’ patriotism over debt-ceiling fight

Predictable rhetorical hypocrisy aside, what the tone and content of the Democrats’ attacks suggests is that they either can’t or won’t deal with the possibility that the problem at hand is too much debt, not efforts to reduce the debt. At this point, they’re like junkies resisting rehab, denying that they have a problem and insisting loudly that the real problem is those guys trying to stage the intervention. It’s true, of course, that brinksmanship over the debt ceiling is a less than ideal way to handle this situation, but it’s the only thing tried that has accomplished anything at all under Obama. The Democrats who control the Senate have not passed a budget in three years (even though a budget resolution doesn’t require 60 votes), and have stopped even proposing them for a vote. And they won’t vote for the only Democratic budget on the table, as President Obama’s budget got zero votes in the House and zero votes in the Senate, after last year also getting zero votes in the Senate. As Paul Ryan explains, this is because the Democrats simply don’t want the public to see how much they propose to raise taxes and still not fix any of the nation’s fiscal problems. It seems almost quaint to reflect that one of the major controversies of the 2004 presidential campaign was John Kerry’s vote on an $87 billion war appropriations bill; today you can have a $111 billion projected increase in one of Obamacare’s line items and the Administration barely feels the need to explain it, let alone return to Congress for votes. When the party controlling two-thirds of the branches responsible for taxes and spending won’t attempt to fix the problem, the House has little choice but to use the only tools available to it.