The Executive who refused to Execute

President Obama addresses the press corps

 yesterday on sequestration.

(Fox News TV Screenshot by Dick Bergeron)

After a cursory gathering with leaders of Congress yesterday, President Barack Obama held a little publicized, yet dour press conference to report on the results of that meeting. 

House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and their lieutenants were invited to that get-together.

As anyone who is following this latest of beltway originated crises knows, that get-together yielded no progress on the now politically ubiquitous topic of sequestration.

It’s not even clear why the President called this meeting at the 11^th hour, on the last day possible to negotiate a solution.  Not he, his staff, nor anyone else in the leadership of Congress had the appetite to effect a compromise.

Americans seem to know very little about the nature of the term ‘sequester’ – only one in four Americans admits to even having heard of it. 
This latest manifestation of political paralysis was sponsored by the White House in 2011, agreed to by both chambers of the Congress, and signed into law by President Obama. 

Effective today, sequestration puts into motion the beginning of $85 billion in mandatory across-the-board decreases to proposed discretionary spending scheduled for the current fiscal year.

That’s the short version of what sequestration means – the word itself makes folly of the English language.

Just this week, President Obama refused to consider a GOP proposal which would have given him full authority to review and to determine where spending increases should be lowered. 

Had the president gone along with it, that suggestion would have given him line-by-line fiscal authority to reduce cost increases.  That’s the problem that corporate CEO’s, elected officials on school boards, town councils, and those in mayoral positions throughout the nation are faced with every day.

The bill that would have authorized this feature was voted down this week by Congress under the threat of a presidential veto.

As it becomes implemented, the process of sequestration will resemble a surgeon performing in the operating room with a cleaver instead of with surgical instruments.

It is easier for the president to let that responsibility slide than to shoulder the burden that goes along with it. 

Brace yourself for more political theatrics.  The collateral damage and misery of failed leadership will fall upon people who should not be made to feel the pain.