Written By : John Hawkins

“Unfortunately, we can’t vote on a speech.” — Mitch McConnell

In politics, the minority party is often accused of refusing to govern and just engage in backseat driving instead. It’s fascinating to see how that dynamic has been turned on its head as the Democrats, who are actually in charge, are refusing to govern and criticizing what the minority party is offering instead.

This is a natural outgrowth of what has become the Democratic Party’s overriding rule: Politics is everything and what’s good for the country in nothing.

The dilemma here is that a budget that Democrats in Congress would want to vote for would….

1) Dramatically increase spending
2) Do nothing to reduce entitlement costs
3) Raise taxes

All three of those items would be unpopular and so, Americans would prefer a Republican budget which would…

1) Dramatically cut spending
2) Reduce entitlement costs
3) Lower taxes

Reducing spending is popular, but restructuring Social Security and Medicare is not. So, although a Republican budget would be more popular than a Democratic budget, the Democrats are betting that a Republican budget will be less popular than their refusing to do a budget at all.

So, Paul Ryan’s budget got 40 votes yesterday in the Senate while Barack Obama’s “Deficits forevermore” Feb budget was voted down 97-0. The Democratic excuse for voting down Obama’s budget was that he has a new budget, that has more cuts in it, but as Mitch McConnell pointed out, Barack “budget” is nothing but a vaguely worded speech.

At some point, saying, “We’re in charge and we’re not going to lead, but the other guys would be even worse,” doesn’t cut it anymore. If the Democrats couldn’t pass a budget in 2010 with a huge numbers advantage and they can’t even offer up a serious budget in 2011, then quite frankly they’re just not up to the job of governing.

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