Gregg Eviscerates Orszag
Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010God bless Sen. Judd Gregg for eviscerating OMB Director Peter Orszag during yesterday’s Senate Budget Committee hearing. Here’s what Sen. Gregg said in response to Director Orszag’s tesimony:
While President Obama was visiting Nashua, Gregg’s birthplace, the three-term senator was on Capitol Hill skewering Peter Orszag over the plan to funnel $30 billion from the Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Gregg erupted as Orszag spoke of the TARP use to solve lingering problems with access to credit for small businesses. “No! No! No!” he yelled out. “You can’t make that type of statement with any legitimacy. You cannot make that statement.” Gregg then held up a guideline for the TARP, which he helped write in 2008 to keep the country from further economic collapse.
“This is the law,” he said. “Let me tell you what the law says. Let me read to you again because you don’t appear to understand the law. The law is very clear. The monies recouped from the TARP shall be paid into the general fund of the Treasury for the reduction of the public debt. It’s not for a piggy bank because you’re concerned about lending to small businesses and you want to get a political event when you go out and make a speech in Nashua, N.H.”
Gregg accused Orszag and Obama of passing on debt to generations of Americans and having an abashed sidestepping of the TARP law. “And,” he said, “you ought to at least have the integrity to be forthright about it.”
The legislation that established TARP is very specific. Once the money is repaid, that money goes into the general fund. It’s against the law to use the repaid money as a slush fund to be spent on whatever this administration wants to spend it on. PERIOD.
Under further questioning from Gregg, Orszag said the administration would be seeking congressional approval. Then Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-VT, chimed in, “That is how laws are made usually, Congress passes them.”
Gregg fired back, “Did the senator from Vermont make a statement? Well the senator is wrong. This is the law as it stands today. There is no law on the books.”
This administration and their progressive allies in Congress have this nasty habit of running roughshod on the laws of this country, especially if those laws stand in the way of President Obama’s ability to recklessly spend money at unsustainable rates. Thank God that people of the intellectual heft of Sen. Gregg still serve in the Senate. Sen. Gregg is the taxpayer’s watchdog. For that alone, I’ll grant him hero status.
Orszag, whose official title is director of the Office of Management and Budget, appeared before the committee to testify on the President’s 2011 budget. In his prepared remarks, Orszag placed much of the blame on the country’s budget deficit on the Bush administration.
It’s getting old to hear President Bush get blamed for everything that’s wrong with the US economy and the federal government’s budget deficits. It simply doesn’t pass the laugh test. The administration and the congress that passed two omnibus spendin bills, the failed stimulus bill and a budget that runs up trillions of dollars of debt over the next decade simply don’t have any credibility as being fiscally responsible.
President Bush wasn’t a fiscal conservative by any stretch but it wasn’t his signature that turned this administration’s failed stimulus bill into law. It wasn’t President Bush’s signatures that turned the Democratic Congress’s omnibus spending bills into a 25 percent spending increase of the federal budget. This administration and the Democratic majority’s reckless spending habits are documented facts. This isn’t theory. This isn’t speculation.
Dick Morris’s column puts the administration’s argument to rest. Here’s the important statistics: (more…)