House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) said Tuesday night he thinks President Obama spends more time filling out his college basketball brackets than he does drafting his annual budget.
"How can a president not want to balance the budget? How does he forgot what he said? One of his first goals in the first four years was to cut the deficit in half. Now he doesn’t care. He doesn’t even produce a budget,” McCarthy told Fox News. "I’ll bet you this. I bet you he spends more time filling out his March Madness brackets than he does writing a budget.”
Fox host Greta Van Susteren noted that budget writing was typically handled by White House staff, not the president. But McCarthy doubled down on his criticism, saying Obama was avoiding the budget process "for political reasons."
“There’s no excuse why he can’t. But think of this. He came to the State of the Union. He laid out to the American public what he wanted to achieve. That was doing a lot of different things financially,” McCarthy said. “How can he even picture about wanting to achieve those if he didn’t first put on paper what you can afford and what you can’t?”
On Tuesday, the White House for the first time confirmed that their budget would likely be released the week of April 8, two months after the deadline mandated by law. The president's budget typically precedes proposals from Congress, and is expected in the first week in February. This is the third consecutive year that Obama has missed that deadline.
White House press secretary Jay Carney has defended the delay, saying that the sequestration and "fiscal cliff" deal complicated an already difficult budgeting process.
"When the president introduces his budget, it will be an important contribution to what we hope will be a process of regular order where a compromise is reached that embodies the principles of balance when it comes to deficit reduction that the president supports, that Senate Democrats support, House Democrats support, a lot of Senate Republicans support, the vast majority of the American people support, and that enables us to deal with these important issues even as we’re dealing with other challenges like comprehensive immigration reform, like reducing gun violence, like investing in education and innovation and infrastructure," Carney said. "Because our fiscal challenges are important and our budget priorities are very important, but we have other priorities, too, and the American people expect us to be working on all of them."
