President Obama will officially transmit his fiscal year 2014 budget proposal on Thursday, a full 66 days after the deadline set by law. The past two years, by contrast, the president has been merely a week late, although as this chart via budget.house.gov shows, the norm among presidents since Harding has been to submit the budget either shortly before or on the deadline date.
But in reporting on the matter, Politico's Ginger Gibson relegated mention of that delinquency to paragraph 13 in her 19-paragraph story, "GOP ready to bash President Obama's budget." To Gibson, even President Obama's inexcusable tardiness in presenting a federal budget must be presented in light of partisan Republicans, who:
... won’t miss an opportunity to point out that the president missed his deadline, which is set by law as the first Monday in February.
"Missed his deadline" is putting it kindly, and it's not Mr. Obama's deadline, it's one imposed by federal law.
Here's how Gibson opened her story (emphasis mine):
President Barack Obama might think he’s offering a compromise budget on Wednesday when he formally unveils it.
But Senate Republicans — a group Obama will try to woo with a dinner that night — are expected to vigorously push back, casting the 2014 spending plan as another attempt to raise taxes to fuel more deficit spending.
Communication staffers for Republican senators met Thursday to map out how they would respond to the budget and to organize a united front.
To her credit, Gibson did note that this was the first time in years that Democrats had taken any action on the federal budget, having presented their budget blueprint earlier this year:
Both the House and the Senate have passed budget bills — the latter for the first time in four years. But the two chambers are on hold in the budget dance until the president’s budget lands and will then size up where it falls on the partisan spectrum.
As I wrote back in February, after the White House burned through its first self-imposed tardy deadline of February 13, the media simply have no objection to the fact that Mr. Obama -- who has no more elections to fear losing -- has been utterly AWOL when it comes to a basic statutory responsibility of his office.
