Boehner’s Budget Betrayal Will Haunt Republicans

In one of his final acts before leaving Congress, now-former House Speaker John Boehner teamed up with President Obama for one last embrace. This unholy union concocted a scheme to bust the spending caps, while virtually eliminating the debt ceiling for the final 15 months of Obama’s term in office.

While Boehner and Obama pushing progressive legislation is not uncommon for this dastardly duo, this budget deal flies in the face of conservative principles because it wipes away the one real victory House Republicans managed to score since taking back control of the lower chamber in January 2011.

This budget is an utter disgrace and a complete betrayal of the grass-roots conservative activists who worked so hard to defeat Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats during the 2010 elections.

In 2011, Congress passed the Budget Control Act, which mandated automatic across-the-board cuts in projected spending increases over 10 years — known as “sequestration” — in exchange for a debt-ceiling hike. This law created annual discretionary spending caps and would have saved $1.2 trillion.

Budget deficits had exceeded $1 trillion in consecutive years, a combination of the recession and Obama’s dramatic spending-increases bill, and House Republicans saw an opportunity to leverage a debt-ceiling increase for spending restraint.

The Budget Control Act worked. “Sequestration may have been a blunt instrument, but it has been one of the few successful restraints on federal spending in recent years,” writes the Cato Institute’s Michael Tanner. “Without it and the caps in the Budget Control Act, federal spending would have been at least $200 billion higher since 2011.”