A few days ago Rep. Jeb Hensarling was defending a Republican budget plan that offered stark cuts to Social Security and Medicare to end the deficit, but this morning leadership offered him up as the GOP poster boy for a far less specific spending blueprint.
“Serious fiscal responsibility requires more than just tinkering around the margins,” Hensarling (R-TX) said in the Republican weekly address.
“Republicans have proposed adopting strict budget caps that limit federal spending on an annual basis and are enforceable by the President,” he said. “These caps were a critical plank in the fiscally-responsible budget alternative Republicans proposed last year and yet they are noticeably absent from the President’s budget.”
He does not, however, laud Rep. Paul Ryan’s “roadmap” that ends the deficit in 50 years by effectively privatizing Medicare and Social Security and dramatically cutting benefits. Hensarling, the next-most-powerful Republican on the budget committee behind Ryan, earlier this week supported those ideas in a television interview.
Instead, Hensarling points listeners to the GOP’s “budget solutions” from 2009 – a skeletal plan that was rejected on a partyline vote last spring.
In the address Hensarling also criticizes the Obama budget plan as having record spending and creating the largest deficit in the nation’s history.
Watch the video here.
The Democratic National Committee this morning called Hensarling out for offering “misleading” suggestions that “simply don’t square with the facts.”
In a lengthy fact check the DNC says the Republicans are distorting data to criticize the stimulus plan.
One of Hensarling’s claims is that the Obama-preferred debt commission “does not yet exist,” a true statement, but he fails to note that it was inexplicably blocked by Senate Republicans who sponsored the measure.
After Hensarling told MSNBC’s Chris Matthews Monday: “You can get better health care and better retirement security if you go to a defined contribution plan,” Republican leadership quickly stepped away from him and said he was speaking off message.
The GOP leaders have continued to insist that Ryan’s “roadmap” is not their official plan.
Meanwhile, Democrats are having a field day.
