Weekly Columns

It's officially budget season in Washington -- the period from January to April when the president, House and Senate are all legally required to produce a budget plan to establish spending priorities for the coming year and beyond. As it has for four of the past five years, the process formally commenced with President Obama failing to submit his budget blueprint by the statutory deadline.

In his second inaugural address, President Obama did not utter the word "debt" a single time. While the president had no hesitation discussing policies to increase spending, he remained virtually silent regarding the most important and urgent challenge currently threatening the nation's future.

Much of the recent coverage of 11th-hour legislative deals and partisan stalemates focuses on negotiations between House Republican leadership and the White House. Yet the most underreported factor in the habitual Washington gridlock of the past two years is the failure of the Democratic Senate to do its job.

President Obama spent the last press briefing of his first term lecturing Congress to "pay the bills they have already racked up." "They" is a curious choice of pronoun for a president who has accumulated more debt than any chief executive in history.

After the 113th Congress was officially sworn in on January 3, one of the first orders of business was to approve new rules under which the legislative process will operate during this session of Congress. House Resolution 5, the House Rules Package for the 113th Congress, not only outlines procedural guidelines for the legislative session but establishes a framework for scaling back the size and scope of the federal government.

During the 2011 debt ceiling debate, President Obama famously declared that the government should "eat our peas" and raise the debt ceiling with no strings attached. But it is the president who needs to get comfortable with the idea of eating not only peas but carrots and spinach, as well. Now that Congress has made the Bush-era tax cuts permanent for 98 percent of American workers, tax rate increases are off the menu. The president's only options for reducing the deficit are spending cuts, entitlement reform and tax reform.

The fiscal cliff fiasco has been perhaps a fitting end to a year and a legislative session full of frustrating, down-to-the-wire legislative battles. Passing major legislation is often such a contentious, eleventh-hour process, it seems as if all of Washington is hopelessly dysfunctional. While this is largely true, there are a few congressional success stories worth highlighting.

The "Accountability Review Board" assembled by the State Department to investigate security failures leading to the Benghazi terror attack has released a report that fails to hold any senior officials accountable for the assault that claimed four American lives.