***HYPOCRISY ALERT***
After Refusing To Even Introduce A Budget & Voting Against Four Separate Proposals, Tester Has The Audacity To Attack Rehberg
File this one under “You Can’t Make It Up” – as of today it has now been 1,066 days since Jon Tester and Senate Democrats last passed a budget in the U.S. Senate, while the federal debt has skyrocketed past $15 trillion. And just as they did last year, Tester and his Democratic colleagues are refusing to even introduce a budget in the Senate this year.
Yet, as Politico reports, Tester’s campaign had the audacity to put this out yesterday after the Republican-led House voted on a budget:
- Tester’s camp anticipated this vote, and charged that it’s irresponsible for Rehberg to be against both the GOP blueprint and the president’s budget. “Congressman Rehberg just voted against seven different budget proposals–from the right, left and center–without offering any alternatives of his own. It might be politically convenient to vote against everything, but Montanans deserve real solutions–not whatever’s convenient for Dennis Rehberg,” said Tester campaign spokkesman Aaron Murphy.
Clearly Mr. Murphy would have been well-advised to check his own candidate’s record because on a single day last year, Senator Tester voted against four separate budget proposals while again, refusing to even introduce his own proposal. On May 25th, 2011:
- Tester first voted against the House budget (a motion to proceed to it)
- And then he voted against the President’s budget (Again, a motion to proceed)
- and then he voted against a third budget proposal offered by Senator Pat Toomey (Again, a motion to proceed)
- and then he voted against a fourth budget proposal offered by Senator Rand Paul (Again, a motion to proceed)
In other words, Senator Tester did not vote for a single budget proposal, and instead fell in line behind his leader Harry Reid who said this to the Los Angeles Times in an interview just five days before those votes:
- Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said it would be “foolish” for Democrats to propose their own federal budget for 2012, despite continued attacks from Republicans that the party is ducking its responsibility to put forward a solution to the nation’s deficit problems. “There’s no need to have a Democratic budget in my opinion,” Reid said in an interview Thursday. “It would be foolish for us to do a budget at this stage.”
This is all the more ironic because as a candidate in 2006, Tester routinely claimed to support a balanced budget and pilloried his opponent Conrad Burns for government spending. Click here to watch just one example.
“It’s clear Senator Tester will literally say or do anything to get re-elected but his hypocrisy on the budget debate has reached new levels. For over three years, Senator Tester and his liberal friends in Washington have refused to pass a budget while our debt has skyrocketed past $15 trillion,” said National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC) spokesman Brian Walsh. “Montanans deserve a fiscal conservative, Republican Senator who will rein in Barack Obama’s reckless tax-and-spend agenda.”
BACKGROUND …
FLASHBACK
In 2006, Jon Tester Promised That He Would Support A Balanced Budget
