A Senate plan to ice the sequester and let President Obama figure out how to cut $85 billion was ridiculed by a key House Republican leader Wednesday who mocked the president for claiming the mandatory budget cuts forced the release of illegal immigrants from jail this week.
"If the president's idea of how to manage the federal government is to release 6,000-10,000 people who have been detained and most of the people who have been detained are because they are not just here illegally in the United States, but have committed some kind of criminal act in addition to that, that seems to me to be a pretty misguided approach to how to save money," said House Judiciary Committee Chairman Rep. Bob Goodlatte.
Goodlatte, asked about the Senate plan to hand the budget cutting reins over to Obama, also rapped the president's threat to cut staff in small airport air traffic towers as the smart way to meet the spending reductions.
Noting that the total spending cut in the sequester amounts to about 2.7 percent of agency budgets, he said, "If you are going to take all of that out of a very small portion of the FAA's total budget, that's gross mismanagement on the part of the president."
He also hit Obama's "grandstanding techniques of attempting to stampede the public" into giving up the spending cuts in the sequester. "When you are running a trillion dollar deficit a year, and you have a $3.5 trillion budget and you are required to cut $85 billion out of that, it would seem to me there are better ways to do it," said the lawmaker from Roanoke, Va.
