OH... prove it!
Because Politifact quoting..
"While both parties are culpable for sequestration because the Budget Control Act passed Congress, the president proposed it originally and ultimately owns its outcome,said Mackenzie Eaglen, an expert on defense.
What the president said is not correct," Woodward told POLITICO. "HeÂ’s mistaken. And itÂ’s refuted by the people who work for him."
All Boehner did was follow Obama's lead and passed the resolution..
In the House, 174 Republicans and 95 Democrats voted for the law, while 66 Republicans and 95 Democrats opposed it. (Final tally: Passed 269-161.)
In the Senate, 28 Republicans and 45 Democrats voted for it, while 19 Republicans and 6 Democrats opposed it. (Final tally: Passed 74-26)
But Obama is once again getting a pass by the MSM and who is getting the blame for something Obama's WH suggested first???
Wrong yet again!
Your own OP admits the sequester was brought up in the Summer of 2011. When the negotiations between Boner and Obama broke down on July 22, 2011, Boner posted his sequester proposal on his own website July 25, 2011 as part of a "two step approach to hold Obama accountable." Obama then offered to follow it as an olive branch to Boner to restart negotiations.
Two-Step Approach to Hold President Obama Accountable | Speaker.gov
CAPS TO CONTROL FUTURE SPENDING
The framework imposes spending caps that would establish clear limits on future spending and serve as a barrier against government expansion while the economy grows.
Failure to remain below these caps will trigger automatic across-the-board cuts (otherwise known as sequestration). This is the same mechanism used in the 1997 Balanced Budget Agreement.
John Boehner, July 25, 2011
From this source:
Obama?s fanciful claim that Congress ?proposed? the sequester - The Washington Post
and virtually every mention shows this was a White House gambit.
Page 215 (July 12, 2011):
They turned to [White House national economic council director Gene] Sperling for details about a compulsory trigger if they didnÂ’t cut spending or raise taxes in an amount at least equivalent to the debt ceiling increase.
“A trigger would lock in our commitment,” Sperling explained. “Even though we disagree on the composition of how to get to the cuts, it would lock us in. The form of the automatic sequester would punish both sides. We’d have to September to avert any sequester” — a legal obligation to make spending cuts.
“Then we could use a medium or big deal to force tax reform,” Obama said optimistically.
“If this is a trigger for tax reform,” [House speaker John] Boehner said, “this could be worth discussing. But as a budget tool, it’s too complicated. I’m very nervous about this.”
“This would be an enforcement mechanism,” Obama said.
Now tell me which is first 7/12/11 for WH... or 7/25/11 ??
Again you are using Woodward's already discredited book as the sole source of your claim.
There was no discussion of "triggers" until Wednesday July 20, 2011 and the triggers discussed were completely different from Woodward's. The mention of the sequester first appeared when Boner posted his framework on his website July 25, 2011 after all negotiations had broken down by July 22, 2011. Woodward has both the date and triggers completely wrong.
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/01/m...all&adxnnlx=1361426630-JudYfmwSRFzWshPBZBhdwA
The other remaining area of contention had to do with the problem of enforcement provisions, or “triggers,” in the deal. Because tax reform would take some time for Congress to puzzle out, while the spending cuts were relatively straightforward, the White House had been concerned from the start about being double-crossed. How could Democrats be assured that the Republican-controlled House wouldn’t simply announce a deal, enact only the spending cuts they wanted and then sabotage the revenue piece? The answer,
Obama’s team decided, were a couple of “triggers” — something both sides really hated — that would automatically kick in if they didn’t come up with a version of tax reform that each party could stomach.
Specifically, Obama had two triggers in mind. The first, for Democrats, would have rescinded the Bush tax cuts for the highest earners. Boehner rejected this idea. He pointed out that Democrats themselves would have little incentive to pass tax reform if, by not passing it, they could achieve one of their most cherished policy objectives — the elimination of the Bush tax cuts.
The second trigger, to appease Republicans, would include an automatic $425 billion in cuts to Medicare and Medicaid over 10 years. But Boehner repeatedly said that he wanted his own “political trophy” as a trigger, something that had the same resonance for the right as the Bush tax cuts had for the left —
namely the elimination of the “individual mandate,” the central plank in Obama’s health-care law that required every American to be insured. Striking down the provision was a top priority for the Tea Partiers in Congress, who saw it as evidence of Obama’s tyrannical tendencies. Obama wouldn’t entertain the possibility. The argument had been going on since the first round of negotiations between the two men and their staffs, but now that a deal seemed imminent, the question of how to enforce it had taken on a new urgency. At its core, the trigger debate was a matter of trust; each man had to be assured that the other wasn’t going to let his party renege on the tax-reform agreement when the inevitable arguments arose. And because they hadn’t worked together much and barely knew each other on a personal level, the only way for Obama and Boehner to feel reassured was if the political cost of pulling out was intolerably high to both of them.
Obama and Boehner argued heatedly but respectfully over both sticking points — the revenue number and the triggers — during a two-hour meeting in the Oval Office on Wednesday, July 20. By the next morning, both men were facing rebellions on the Hill. The Times’s Carl Hulse and Jackie Calmes had written a front-page article disclosing the existence of the new round of talks and asserting that a deal was very near. Arriving for the weekly lunch of the Democratic Senate caucus, Jack Lew found himself berated by senators who were angered by the talk of entitlement cuts in exchange for the relatively paltry $800 billion in tax money, and livid at having heard about it from The Times. Senator Harry Reid, the majority leader, had been fully briefed (along with the House leader, Nancy Pelosi) only the night before. He remained stonily and pointedly silent in the meeting, while Lew absorbed one verbal blow after another.
At that very moment, Boehner was dialing Rush Limbaugh’s radio show, unbidden, in an effort to quell the eruption on the right. It wasn’t only the additional revenue that conservatives hated. Having campaigned in 2010 against Obama’s health-care plan, which included future Medicare cuts, conservatives in Congress were no more eager than Democrats to give the issue away in advance of 2012. (Their resistance to this part of the grand bargain highlighted what is perhaps the central paradox of budget politics on the right: Republicans have defined themselves almost entirely by their determination to reduce debt, but virtually every means of actually getting there — taxes, defense cuts, restructuring entitlements — strikes them as politically unpalatable.) “There is absolutely no deal,” Boehner assured Limbaugh on air.
And yet, even then, as powerful contingents in both parties rose up to oppose a deal that was already tenuous, negotiations were proceeding amiably and apace. At the White House that Thursday morning, July 21, Jackson, Loper, Nabors, Sperling and Lew, among other aides, agreed to set aside the revenue question and focus on hammering out some of the smaller discrepancies in the two offers. By now, a level of trust had grown among them; the mere fact that they had exchanged so much paper, and that none of it had been leaked to reporters or bloggers, seemed to cement their working relationship. To hear aides on both sides tell it, anyone who wandered into NaborsÂ’s West Wing office would have thought they were moving, inexorably and constructively, toward a final agreement.
