Chicago Tribune: Obama’s FAA Cuts Don’t Work Because Americans “Are Able to Read”

President Obama’s cynical scheme to use his sequester as a political football is receiving scathing reviews. This is a must-read from the Chicago Tribune Editorial Board:

Somewhere between the Oval Office and a snarled airport near you, the stunt pilots in the Obama administration made a terrible miscalculation.
 
Most citizens are able to read. They’re seeing numerous articles in the public prints explaining how the Federal Aviation Administration’s layoff scheme created a crisis that simply doesn’t have to be. Bloomberg News weighed in with a detailed analysis explaining that the FAA “has more than enough air traffic controllers to manage furloughs without flight delays. … The FAA, with the consent of the controllers’ union, could keep sequestration from affecting flights by targeting furloughs at airports with excess numbers of controllers, but the agency has declined to pursue that strategy.”
 
That’s key: Over the year and a half since President Barack Obama signed the law that required spending curbs through sequestration in 2013, you haven’t seen the FAA, or its parent the Transportation Department, or its parent the White House, trying to absorb a relatively small budget cut in ways that would least inconvenience fliers and least imperil the U.S. economy. Quite the opposite: This whole exercise appears to have been an effort to demonstrate that the federal enterprise cannot survive cuts to the growth of spending.
 
And now the scramble for damage control is on, as evidenced by this headline posted Thursday by The Washington Post: “Pressured by Senate Democrats, White House says it’s open to fix on FAA furloughs.”
 
Got that? Democratic senators aren’t rallying ’round. No, they want the Democratic president to stop inconveniencing their constituents.
 
Sure enough, here comes Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood finally admitting that, “There are too many delays, and common ordinary citizens are being affected.” And here comes White House press secretary Jay Carney, tail similarly tucked, now offering that if Congress wants to pass an FAA fix while leaving the rest of the sequester in place, “we would be open to looking at that.”
 
Note Carney’s sly suggestion that Congress needs to do something — even though it seems clear that the administration has had every tool it needs to end the furloughs (and the flight delays). Carney’s no dummy: The White House’s sequester test flight may have overshot the runway, but press secretaries aren’t paid to confess that, “We, um, just crashed.”

Read the rest here.