Obama repeatedly lied about responsibility for budget sequester
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Woodward: Obama repeatedly lied about responsibility for budget sequester cuts
President Barack Obama, accompanied by emergency responders, a group of workers the White House says could be affected if state and local governments lose federal money as a result of budget cuts, gestures as he speaks in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office building on the White House complex in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
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President Barack Obama and former White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew repeatedly lied by last year by claiming congressional Republicans were responsible for the looming $85 billion cut in the federal budget through sequestration, according to The Washington Post editor Bob Woodward.
Based on interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved in budget planning, Obama personally approved Lew’s plan to propose the mandatory trigger to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in July 2011.
A majority of Republicans ultimately voted for the Budget Control Act, which included the sequester.
“The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said during the third presidential debate with Mitt Romney. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”
Woodward noted that Lew toed the same line while campaigning for the president in Florida in October 2012.
“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said, adding that it “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”
Earlier this month, at his confirmation hearing to be treasury secretary, Lew all but admitted Woodward’s account is correct.
“What I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences,” Lew told Republican Sen. Richard Burr. “And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on, and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”
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Woodward: Obama repeatedly lied about responsibility for budget sequester cuts
President Barack Obama, accompanied by emergency responders, a group of workers the White House says could be affected if state and local governments lose federal money as a result of budget cuts, gestures as he speaks in the South Court Auditorium in the Eisenhower Executive Office building on the White House complex in Washington, Tuesday, Feb. 19, 2013. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak)
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President Barack Obama and former White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew repeatedly lied by last year by claiming congressional Republicans were responsible for the looming $85 billion cut in the federal budget through sequestration, according to The Washington Post editor Bob Woodward.
Based on interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved in budget planning, Obama personally approved Lew’s plan to propose the mandatory trigger to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid in July 2011.
A majority of Republicans ultimately voted for the Budget Control Act, which included the sequester.
“The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said during the third presidential debate with Mitt Romney. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”
Woodward noted that Lew toed the same line while campaigning for the president in Florida in October 2012.
“There was an insistence on the part of Republicans in Congress for there to be some automatic trigger,” Lew said, adding that it “was very much rooted in the Republican congressional insistence that there be an automatic measure.”
Earlier this month, at his confirmation hearing to be treasury secretary, Lew all but admitted Woodward’s account is correct.
“What I did was said that with all other options closed, we needed to look for an option where we could agree on how to resolve our differences,” Lew told Republican Sen. Richard Burr. “And we went back to the 1984 plan that Senator [Phil] Gramm and Senator [Warren] Rudman worked on, and said that that would be a basis for having a consequence that would be so unacceptable to everyone that we would be able to get action.”
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