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Obama Sets Up New Shutdown Fight
President Obama on Friday set up another potential budget shutdown fight, insisting on a long-term spending bill and saying he would not sign another temporary measure like the current one, which expires Dec. 11.
“I will not sign another short-sighted spending bill like Congress sent me this week,” Bush said. “Congress has to do it’s job. It can’t flirt with another shutdown.”
Laying the groundwork for a bruising brawl in the fall with congressional conservatives, Obama demanded that the sequester budget caps be broken and the spending spigot open wide so lower spending doesn’t make it even harder on things like “an aging population,” schools and the military.
“It’s time now to undo them,” Obama said in a press conference.
The president warned Congress against adding “extraneous” issues to the budget debate, like their objections to Planned Parenthood. “They want to defund Planned Parenthood? There’s a way to do it: Pass a law, override my veto,” Obama said.
Obama returned to his demand for gun control, which he had just lodged Thursday in the aftermath of the mass murder at an Oregon college. He suggested Republicans were resisting him not out of principle, but because they were getting their marching orders from the National Rifle Association.
“It’s because of politics. It’s because interest groups fund campaigns and feed people fear,” Obama said. “And in fairness, it’s not just in the Republican Party, although the Republican Party is just uniformly opposed to gun safety laws.”
Obama took a moment to skewer Jeb Bush for saying, in relation to the shooting, that “stuff happens,” an attempt by Bush to indicate that politicians should not overreact.
“I don’t even think I have to react to that one,” Obama said. “I think the American people should hear that and make their own judgments based on the fact that every couple of months, we have a mass shooting. And they can decide whether they consider that ‘stuff happening.’”
Obama ridiculed his opposition, saying even some Republicans in Congress suggest he wants gun control because he’s plotting to seize power.
His opponents charge that gun control is “an assault on freedom or Communistic, or a plot by me to take over and stay in power forever or something,” Obama asserted. “I mean, there are all kinds of crackpot theories out here, some of which are ratified by elected officials on occasion.”
But he nevertheless suggested he has no plans for dramatic, unilateral executive action, indicating the matter was in the hands of Congress. “Main thing I’m going to do it talk about it,” he said.
Obama said voters should, for at least a few election cycles, judge candidates entirely based on their position on gun laws. “You have to just for a while be a single-issue voter,” he said.
Strikingly, Obama said nothing during the press conference about the Oregon’s gunman’s targeting of Christians, who revealed their faith only to be shot and killed.
Source: http://www.whitehousedossier.com/2015/10/02/obama-sets-shutdown-fight/
