The Establishment’s Obama Derangement Syndrome

Brian Beutler

Others have done an excellent job explaining why so many pundits and news analysts are constitutionally unable to describe the impasse over sequestration as anything other than a bipartisan failure — while also revealing, perhaps unintentionally, that President Obama is advocating the very compromise they claim to believe is necessary.

But mark down Feb. 27, 2013, as the day this self-deception morphed into something more like the establishment’s very own Obama derangement syndrome.

Here’s Bob Woodward — again! — on MSNBC Wednsday morning arguing that Obama’s decision not seize imperial powers but instead to follow the letter of the sequestration law amounts to a “kind of madness.”

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The obscure type of budget document Woodward’s referring to is called a duly enacted law — passed by Congress, signed by the President — and the only ways around it are for Congress to change it (Obama’s trip to Virginia on Tuesday was all about pushing Congress to do that) or for Obama to break it. Sequestration is bad policy, but not remotely unconstitutional, and if Obama decided to ignore it and just spend money as if the law didn’t exist the howls of outrage we’d hear from Woodward and others would be entirely justified.

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