“[Amash] and a small group of like-minded legislators rejected Speaker Boehner’s plea to pass legislation requiring Congress and the president be subject to ObamaCare, and put on hold the special new tax on medical equipment. This irresponsible action hurt over 50 great West Michigan businesses and was part of the chaos that led the nation to the edge of default,” the letter says.”
Amash should start by dispelling the White House myth, perpetuated throughout the media and throughout the political class that the nation was ever at “the edge of default”.
1. The statute authority for contintuation of the government to continue to raise revenue on the same basis that revenue was being raised was not in doubt - revenue coming in WAS going to proceed, under law, as it had been.
2. The question before Congress was how it COULD be spent and if the federal government COULD raise the debt ceiling limit.
3. Constitutionally neither of those facts - and given the federal government’s substantial and ongoing revenues, could have legally, nor could have financially, required or allowed the Obama White House to default.
4. The only kind of payments that the Constitution MANDATES the federal government MUST pay, whether it pays for anything else or not, IS anything that comes due on the debt it owes, which is predominately interest on the debt. Everything else it pays IS subject to what needs to be paid on the debt; before anything else.
5. The only reduction in what the federal government might have not paid, or might have temporarily deferred payments on, would have been in (a) the “discretionary” budget - everything outside of “entitlements and or (c) “entitlement spending and or any combination of the two, BUT NOT the constitutionally required payments on the debt.
Those attacking Amash are in one regard allowing themselves to be part of, and participant in, an Obama lie that HE WAS USING AS A THREAT.
It was Obama who was threatening to default on the debt, spend what he would have beeded to not default on his own programs, and in spite of the fact the Constitution mandates the debt be paid, whether any other appropriations of Congress do or do not.
If Obama had gone through on his threat, instead of tightening the sequester belt, he could have, and should have been impeached for it.
Exactly right.
Michigan? Isn’t that where Detroit is? Gone bankrupt? This bunch of geniuses is part of the problem there and ought to shut their collective pie holes. Especially if they can’t get the whine straight. They seem to have events backward and I notice they didn’t say a word about the Kenyan refusing any effort to minimize the effects of Ofuzziecare. These are the same guys cutting employees back to 29 hours/ week to cheepskate out of paying health benefits. They bear watching to see if they also corrupt campaign finance rules in how they fling money around?