Ed Morrissey @ Hot Air:
Orrin Hatch offered today’s Republican response to Barack Obama’s weekly address, and the Senator from Utah wasn’t in a punch-pulling mood. Venting the anger from the GOP on Capitol Hill after the President’s opening bid on fiscal-cliff negotiations, Hatch called it the equivalent of consumer fraud:
“What [Obama] proposed this week was a classic bait and switch on the American people—a tax increase double the size of what he campaigned on, billions of dollars in new stimulus spending and an unlimited, unchecked authority to borrow from the Chinese,” Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah) said in Saturday’s weekly GOP address.
“Maybe I missed it but I don’t recall him asking for any of that during the presidential campaign. These ideas are so radical that they have already been rejected on a bipartisan basis by Congress.”
I wrote about this earlier in the week. During the campaign, Obama insisted that he wanted a balanced approach to deficit reduction, and even proposed a cuts-to-revenue ratio of 5:2. In his convention speech, Obama even made a passing mention of entitlement reform in a second term as a way to control spiraling deficits. Yet, this was the deal Obama had Tim Geithner deliver this week as an opening bid:
On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner was dispatched to Capitol Hill to share Obama’s plan with House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) and Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) The deal included $1.6 trillion in tax hikes, $50 billion in economic stimulus spending and $400 billion in spending cuts. Republicans have demanded more severe spending cuts – including entitlement reform – to begin a discussion on raising taxes.
That ratio turned into a 1:4 rather than a 5:2. Democrats spent yesterday defending the bait-and-switch effort, claiming that Obama was just a good horse trader:
