White House + Congress = Chutzpah
Senior Correspondent Mike Causey does the math behind the origins of sequestration and comes up with a not-so-surprising answer.
As a kid, my best buddy was a kid named Joe Smotrich (or Smotrick). We lived above the mom and pop grocery owned by his parents. His parents were from Russia or the Ukraine. They used a lot of Yiddish words. One was Chutzpah. When I asked Joe what it meant, he explained it like this:
A man goes on trial for killing both his mother and father. He begs the judge for mercy on grounds that he is an orphan!
That’s chutzpah. Get it?
See, he offs his parents, then …
Washington version of chutzpah: The White House is urging Congress not to allow sequestration to continue. If the series of automatic, across-the- board cuts continue, the White House says, it will have an adverse impact on various government programs. Congress is considering it.
Get it?
According to the Washington Post’s Bob Woodward (All the President’s Men), the Obama administration’s top economic types designed in 2011 sequestration and presented it to the Democratic leadership of the Senate.
Woodward said that “Obama personally approved of the plan … to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m., July 27, 2011.” Woodward tends to be precise! Now the White House is urging Congress to find a way around sequestration else everything from air traffic control to meat and poultry inspections will be disrupted.
Apparently the idea behind sequestration — a term many people had never heard before — was that it was so awful, so stupid, that it would never be used. It was designed to force Congress to pass some semi-draconian measures proposed by a BRAC-like bipartisan panel (Simpson-Bowles) setup by the White House.
Despite the threat of sequestration, which hardly anybody then or now understands, Congress OK’d the Budget Control Act, which included the sequester.
Now both sides, the White House and many in Congress, realize it wasn’t such a good idea. But rather than fix it, each now blames the other: Chutzpah rules.
NEARLY USELESS FACTOID
The average life expectancy of an adult gray squirrel is six years.
Source: State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry
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Mike Causey
Mike Causey is senior correspondent for Federal News Network and writes his daily Federal Report column on federal employees’ pay, benefits and retirement.
Follow @mcauseyWFED
