Last week the United States Senate passed a dubious milestone and fittingly it came on the day President Obama gave his State of the Union address.  January 24^th marked the 1,000^th day since the Harry Reid Senate last passed a federal budget.  Families across America sit around their kitchen tables and work on their budgets.  The key to any small business success in America is to follow a budget.  But when it comes to passing a budget, our elected leaders in the Senate are incompetent.  It is unconscionable that the Senate refuses to do the people’s work and pass a budget that will not bankrupt the country.  Where is the outrage from the American people?

Cam Cardow / Ottawa Citizen (click to view more cartoons by Cam)

We are a nation that is over $15 trillion in debt and the greatest deliberative body on the planet cannot produce any budget at all good or bad for the American people.  Most of the blame falls squarely on the shoulders of Democrat Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.  Last spring Harry Reid said about the 2012 budget process, “There’s no need to have a Democratic budget in my opinion. It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.”  Senator Reid is the poster child for what is wrong with Washington.  Reid’s irrational statement about the budget process last year is why he has a 23 percent approval rating – the lowest among all Congressional leaders.

The truth is Senator Reid does not want to develop a budget for the American people because he does not want Democrat members of the Senate to take tough votes that will set their core liberal constituencies’ heads on fire.  Our national debt has grown to unprecedented levels. The credit agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded America’s credit rating for the first time in history last summer.  We are truly in a crisis and tough decisions need to be made by our leaders.  However, Senate Democrats lack the courage to make those tough decisions because of failed leadership from the top.

Although Harry Reid shares most of the blame for not producing a budget, President Obama is guilty as well.  If the President wanted a workable budget from the Senate he would have called on Harry Reid to act.  The modus operandi of the Obama Administration has always been to blame somebody else for its failures. President Obama has not led on bringing our government spending under control and has in fact presided over the greatest expansion of our national debt in history.

President Obama is set to unveil his latest budget for Fiscal Year 2013 on February 13^th – a week later than originally planned.  Obama’s 2013 budget will not be a fiscally sound document, rather it will be a blueprint for his reelection campaign to again play favorites with his liberal base.  Even though Senate Democrats never introduced their own budget last year, the Senate did vote down President Obama’s Fiscal Year 2012 budget 97-0.  It goes without saying that it was a complete disaster for the Obama Administration.

As we head into this new budget season, I have no faith in President Obama and Senate Democrats adopting a truly fiscally sound budget.  It is 280 days until Election Day. Will the American people force the Senate Democrats to produce a budget?  Time will tell.