Sen. Udall and fellow Senate Dems fail the budget character test | COLORADO

Sen. Udall and fellow Senate Dems fail the budget character test | COLORADO

Sen. Udall and fellow Senate Dems fail the budget character test

By WhoSaidYouSaid | September 18th, 2012 U.S. Sen. Mark Udall, D-Colo., today criticized Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney for comments Romney made at a private fundraiser earlier this year that have been well-publicized by Mother Jones magazine and other media outlets.

“You judge a person’s character by what they say in private,” Udall said at a press conference in Sunken Gardens Park, reported Fox 31 Denver. “Mitt Romney has failed the character test.”

We won’t hazard a guess as to what Sen. Udall thought was revealed about the character of then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama when he said this – at a private fundraiser while running for president in 2008 – about people in small towns in Pennsylvania and the Midwest whose jobs have fled…

“So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

The country faces enormous challenges, not the least of which is an unemployment rate persistently above 8 percent, a record number of 47 million citizens on food stamps, a $16 trillion debt and a budget deficit that has run $1 trillion a year during the Obama Administration.
Meanwhile, Sen. Udall – elected to the Senate in 2008 – and his colleagues in the Democratically-controlled upper chamber have failed miserably to accomplish one of the most basic tasks of governance: passing a budget. The last one passed in April 2009, and not since then.

“’On or before April 15 of each year, the Congress shall complete action on a concurrent resolution on the budget for the fiscal year,’ this statute states,” wrote Deroy Murdock in April, the Senate having logged more than 1,000 budgetless days. “Senate Democrats could not care less about this federal law.”

Sen. Udall has had plenty to say on ways to fix the budget, as evidenced by his interview above from 2011 on the Aurora Channel: pay-as-you-go offsets, line-item veto, eliminate earmarks and considering the Bowles-Simpson deficit commission recommendations.

“It’s immoral, if I can end on this note, to do what we’re doing long term, because we’re passing all that debt onto people that don’t have a vote, that’s our children,” said Udall.

Passing a budget would drive accountability for the spending choices made by Congress, and the $5 trillion in debt racked up under the current Administration.
[Updated 9/18/12]