The finger-pointing began during the third presidential debate last fall, on Oct. 22, when President Obama blamed Congress. “The sequester is not something that I’ve proposed,” Obama said. “It is something that Congress has proposed.”
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.”
The president and Lew had this wrong. 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. (Continues at WaPo)
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