It will take a magician to get President Obama’s budget through the Senate with the administration’s priorities intact, one of the centrist members of the Senate Budget Committee declared Monday.
“You want to keep on the three main themes of the president, which is the environment, health, and education — but how we’re going to pull this off, it’s going to take Merlin the Magician,” Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) said during an appearance on Fox News. “Kent Conrad, the chairman of our Budget Committee, is going to have to be Merlin.”
The committee is set to take up the president’s proposed budget this week, but Nelson warned that the committee would likely have to revise it substantially in order to bring it into fiscal balance.
“So we’re going to have to go back and re-work this whole thing, and that’s going to be done this week in the Budget Committee,” he said. “I think we have to be careful. The fact is, that if you load up too much debt, you are putting yourself in a precarious position.”
Key to the budget’s passage, Nelson asserted, would be reforming healthcare. “Otherwise you’ll never make financial end’s meet,” the Florida Democrat warned.
Watch a video of the interview below: