Cancel the sequester — now

As stories spread about airline passengers waiting extra hours because of furloughs imposed by the sequester, and as monthly job reports begin to show the jobs-destroying impact of the sequester increasing, it is time to cancel the sequester.

End it. Stop it. Postpone it. Delay it. Best case: Just kill it. Now. 

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) recently claimed credit for the sequester as a major GOP success, and he deserves the greatest blame for the result, but the sequester is the illegitimate child of bipartisan parents including President Obama. 

The sequester fiasco embodies the worst of every major player in official Washington. Obama was eloquent, passionate and brilliant in his oratorical warnings and photo ops warning about the sequester while doing literally nothing to prevent. Listening to the president castigate the sequester and observing how he did nothing to prevent it, one might think someone else serves as president in the Washington he condemns.

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader in the Senate, never missing an opportunity to abuse filibusters in the service of obstruction, prevented any good-faith attempt to avoid the sequester. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader of the Senate, never missing an opportunity to surrender or lose to GOP filibusters, never tried to prevent the sequester after doing nothing between periods of lengthy Senate recesses. Boehner, as usual afraid of conservative Republican members of his conference and wary of his ambitious majority leader, not only did nothing to prevent the sequester but claimed credit for it as a GOP victory! 

Isn't it bottom of the barrel when the sequester tops a list of achievements? The sequester kills jobs while there are too many jobless. The sequester hurts Americans from coast to coast, from damage to mental health programs to furloughs that punish those who fly, from hurting programs that protect America against terrorists to hurting programs that help the neediest among us.

The sequester brings austerity when austerity is the 'king of dumb" policy for a nation with high joblessness and slow growth. At a minimum, the president and Congress should postpone the sequester, with no questions asked and no conditions attached, until economic growth and job creation improve. Even better they should repeal it and kill it and do their jobs as they were elected to do.

Until then, when any politician attacks the sequester, remember that the blame for the sequester may not be equally divided. But to answer the question of who did it, the answer is similar to the ending of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express: Who did it? They all did it.

Shame on them all.

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