Free Republic

President Obama will nominate current White House chief of staff Jack Lew on Thursday to replace outgoing Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner, according to several news reports. Republicans familiar with Lew, who was a key player in the debt-ceiling negotiations of 2011 as director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), say his nomination makes progress on tax and entitlement reform all the more unlikely in Obama’s second term. “We’ve always viewed him as a classic big-government liberal, someone who has consistently stood in the way of efforts to deal with our debt and deficit,” a senior House GOP aide...

The top Republican on the Senate Budget Committee will oppose Jack Lew's nomination to be Treasury secretary. Sen. Jeff Sessions (R-Ala.) has prepared a statement saying "Jack Lew must never be Secretary of Treasury." He is not saying yet whether he will filibuster the nomination, however, which sources say President Obama will announce Thursday. Sessions expects that the Lew nomination will fail in the Senate, an aide said. The senator says Lew misrepresented Obama's 2012 budget by claiming that it did not add to the debt. "His testimony before the Senate Budget Committee less than two years ago was so...

Jack Lew, President Obama's reported pick to replace outgoing Treasury secretary Tim Geithner, is known as a no-nonsense backroom negotiator with wonkish tendencies, who is admired on the left and grumbled about on the right. A lesser-known but extremely pertinent fact about Lew is that he has the world's worst signature. And pretty soon, that signature could be on every single one of your dollar bills.

President Barack Obama may choose White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew to replace Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner as soon as this week, according to two people familiar with the matter.

After ignoring its own 2009 clip of Obama denying his health-care law was a tax increase, ABC finally played the snippet of the President on Sunday's This Week -- but bizarrely, they failed to mention that it was theirs. Host George Stephanopoulos highlighted an ad from Americans for Prosperity that included the clip, but omitted that he conducted the interview where the President made this denial. Later in the program, Rep. Paul Ryan exposed what the ABC News host omitted, that "the President, on your show, said this is not a tax." [audio available here; video below the jump] Paul...

White House Chief of Staff Jack Lew appeared on all five Sunday talk shows yesterday to defend the budget President Obama will release today. On two of those shows, CNN’s State of the Union and NBC’s Meet the Press, Lew flat out lied about the Democrats’ failure to pass a budget since Obamacare became law. First on Meet the Press, David Gregory asked: “Here’s a stat that a lot of people may not know, but it’s pretty striking. The number of days since Senate Democrats passed a budget is 1,019. Can you just explain as a former budget director, how...

Two senior administration officials say the White House chief of staff, William Daley, is resigning. He's being replaced by Jacob Lew, the budget director. The change will be effective at the end of this month. President Barack Obama planned to announce it later Monday.

William Daley is stepping down as White House chief of staff and budget director Jack Lew is taking over the President Obama’s team as it heads into a tough election year, senior administration officials say. Daley gave his letter of resignation to the president in a private meeting in the Oval Office last week, recounting the administration's successes of his one year on the job and saying it was time for him to return to his hometown of Chicago.

A claim in Ron Suskind’s book, Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington and the Education of a President, that the Obama Administration created a hostile workplace for his female advisors was met with denials from current White House Budget Director Jack Lew. “The contention that the President or any of his male appointees would denigrate these women in any way is mistaken. To the contrary, we all had a broad respect for these ladies,” Lew said as he struggled to suppress a titter over his use of the word “broad.” Former head of the Council of Economic Advisers Christina Romer’s complaint,...

If “pass this bill” is the phrase of the week for President Obama, “not so fast” is the phrase of choice for congressional Republicans. As Obama touts the American Jobs Act as a “fully paid for” panacea for high unemployment and sluggish economic growth, his critics insist he’s glossing over the fine print when it comes to adding to the deficit. “Given the depth of the economic crisis we now face … the lack of fiscal detail that has been provided to Congress is both disappointing and irresponsible,” wrote Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the Budget Committee, in...

Save the Lightning Why we need the F-35 By Thomas Donnelly The Weekly Standard Tuesday, September 6, 2011 Thanks to the provisions of the Budget Control Act and the subsequent directions of President Obama's budget director, Jack Lew, the Department of Defense is figuring out how to trim $1 trillion from its current and planned budgets. Perhaps the principal target in the sights is the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program (aka the Lightning II)—a fact that neatly encapsulates the Pentagon's severe budgetary, programmatic, operational, and strategic problems. It's only modest hyperbole to conclude that as fares the Lightning, so fares...

Nancy Pelosi’s back at the negotiating table on debt ceiling By: Jonathan Allen July 8, 2011 04:22 PM EDT House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi is back at the bargaining table — but it’s not yet clear whether she’s willing to make a deal. Burned by President Barack Obama’s decision to keep her out of negotiations on last year’s tax deal and this spring’s budget bill, sources close to the California Democrat say she is torn between playing deal-maker on a debt limit increase and fully protecting the priorities of Democrats’ liberal base. On Thursday, in advance of a Friday meeting...

Rep. Darrell Issa of California, chairman of the House Oversight Committee, has found another target in the Obama administration’s policy agenda: energy. Late Monday, Issa released a scathing report accusing the White House of being complicit in driving up oil prices to push a move to alternative energy sources. Among other things, the report — “Rising Energy Costs: An Intentional Result of Government Action” — accused the administration of restricting access to domestic energy sources, hindering “fracking” technology and hampering the economic recovery by proposing new taxes on the energy industry.The report also says the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) coordinated...

Congress‘ chief scorekeeper says President Obama’s budget never achieves primary balance, the key measure the White House said would show the country is living within its means. In a preliminary analysis the budget Mr. Obama sent to Capitol Hill last month, the Congressional Budget Office says deficits will total $9.5 trillion over the next decade and never once will it be in balance — even when subtracting interest costs. The closest the government will come to balance is in 2018, when the deficit will be $902 billion and net interest costs are projected to be $725 billion — still leaving...

Last week, President Obama’s budget chief, Jack Lew, took to his White House blog to repeat his claim that the Social Security trust fund is solvent through 2037. And to chide me for suggesting otherwise. I had argued in my last column that the trust fund is empty, indeed fictional. If Lew’s claim were just wrong, that would be one thing. But it provides the intellectual justification for precisely the kind of debt denial and entitlement complacency that his boss is now engaged in. Therefore, once more unto the breach. Lew acknowledges that the Social Security surpluses of the last...