No surrender

It’s been widely reported that Congress last week rescinded the sequester cuts from the budget of the Federal Aviation Administration, ending furloughs for air traffic controllers in response to howls of outrage from passengers forced to endure hours of delays at airport terminals and tarmacs.

(The agency had furloughed 10 percent of its 15,000 traffic controllers on any given day, blaming the sequester.)

But that’s not true. Democrats, led by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., had indeed urged rescinding the minimal budget cuts that went into effect this spring, across the board. There’s little doubt the bureaucrats of the FAA — who could have cut a few percentage points from their budget in any number of less-noticeable areas — chose the flight delays to trigger demands for just such a congressional surrender on spending.

After all, President Obama — even though he originally proposed the sequester as a bargaining chip in pursuit of more tax hikes — had warned that if the cuts went into effect, air traffic would be stalled. It surely wouldn’t take a very insightful FAA administrator to figure out this statement amounted to an instruction from the boss to “make it so.”

Instead, the House of Representatives voted 361-41 last week, not to restore the FAA’s overall budget to pre-sequester levels, but to give the FAA the flexibility to reallocate $253 million to staffing accounts from other parts of its budget. The Senate then OK’d that bill without a recorded vote.

It’s unlikely such a congressional “Mother-May-I” was really needed. At any rate, House Republicans months ago had offered to enact legislation clarifying that Mr. Obama had just such budget-shifting authority to limit harm or inconvenience from these minimal and overdue cuts to runaway federal deficit spending. The president, more interested in causing inconvenience and then blaming it on Republicans, said, “No thanks.”