NRD Editor’s Note: This column first appeared at TheHill.com.
Photo Credit: DonkeyHotey/Flickr
By Rick Manning — President Obama announced that he is appointing current Chief of Staff and former OMB Director Jack Lew to be the nation’s next secretary of the Treasury.
Lew, whose signature featuring a bunch of loops with no discernible letters has become an Internet viral sensation, is a fitting replacement for a Treasury secretary who blamed TurboTax for his failure to properly pay his taxes. After all, Lew is the man responsible for developing two budgets for the Obama administration to submit to Congress. Lew’s budgets were so well thought of that they received a grand total of zero votes.
Zero.
Not a single Republican or even a single Democrat voted for the two budgets that Lew was instrumental in creating.
You have to work really hard to get everyone in Congress to agree, and Lew created that consensus — against his work product.
That is exactly the kind of leadership our nation needs as we attempt to lead the world out of the financial crisis. A man, who through his insight, brilliance and cunning, can bring Harry Reid and Mitch McConnell together to proclaim that his work is a disaster.
Imagine the coalition of governments that could come together to oppose U.S. interests once Lew takes a seat at the table.
Lew’s adept hand could be the catalyst to bring the Palestinians and the Israelis together in joint condemnation of America. He is just that amazing.
Already, Lew is drawing the kind of support one would expect with senators lining up to oppose his nomination. Senate Budget Committee ranking member Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) immediately jumped into the fray, flatly stating, “Jack Lew must never be secretary of the Treasury. His testimony before the Senate Budget Committee less than two years ago was so outrageous and false that it alone disqualifies.”
Wow. Now that is a ringing endorsement. It is rare in Washington to get politicians to say exactly what they mean without parsing words, and it is rarer still for a personality to bring out this level of public honesty.
Only Obama could attempt to replace someone who can’t figure out TurboTax with someone with the track record and personality to engender primal screams of dismay at his appointment.
Only Obama could appoint someone to a job with the requirement that he or she put his signature on dollar bills, who apparently never learned how to write in cursive.
And only Obama could appoint someone who insisted to Congress that the Obama budget that he crafted would not add to the debt of the United States in spite of the fact that it never produced an annual deficit lower than $600 billion over 10 years.
Let’s hope that Jack Lew joins his two budgets in receiving zero votes in the U.S. Senate, and Obama appoints a different Treasury secretary who actually knows that when the government runs a deficit, the federal debt goes up.
Of course, that is probably too much for us to hope.
Rick Manning is the vice president of public policy and communications for Americans for Limited Government.
