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Ryan Budget Gets 40 Votes in Senate, Obama Budget Gets 0

6:29 PM, May 25, 2011 • By JOHN MCCORMACK
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That big fat zero is not a typo.

Not a single U.S. senator voted in favor of President Obama's budget proposal. Meanwhile, five members of GOP caucus voted against Ryan budget: moderates Scott Brown (Mass.), Susan Collins and Olympia Snowe of Maine, independent Lisa Murkowski (Ak.), and staunch libertarian Rand Paul (Ky.). So all of the swing state Republican senators sided with Ryan.

Apparently, the Senate Democrats think if they don't support anything they can't be demagogued in the same way they're demagoguing Ryan's plan. Harry Reid has dropped the phrasing that Republicans would end Medicare "as we know it," in favor of a less subtle statement on the Senate floor: "The Republican plan would kill Medicare."

Democrats can only duck the issue for so long, right? 

On a related note: 

"I do think that the Republican Party right now hasn't sort of figured out what it's for," Obama said in a White House interview [in 2009] with The Courier-Journal and reporters from five other newspapers. "And so as a proxy, they've just decided 'we're going to be against whatever the other side is for.' That's not what's needed in an economic crisis."

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