Thursday, February 28, 2013

How Does Obama Justify Naming The Creator Of The Sequester He Hates, As Treasury Secretary?

By Susan Duclos

Barack Obama has spent million, if not billions, traveling around the country castigating the sequester, saying it will destroy the economy, harm American workers, will kill agencies, destroy our military, etc etc etc...... yet he nominates, and the Senate just confirmed it's creator, Jack Lew, as Treasury Secretary for the United States of America.

Reminder of who Lew is:

The White House chief of staff at the time, Jack Lew, who had been budget director during the negotiations that set up the sequester in 2011, backed up the president two days later.

“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said while campaigning in Florida. It “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”

My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.

Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.

 How does Obama justify handing America's economy to the creator of the sequester, a sequester Obama has spent the last weeks speaking out against vehemently?

Is there any reporter or journalist with enough integrity and guts to ask Obama that simple question?