The Washington Post editors chide Obama:

President Obama, on a Saturday afternoon more than a year into his presidency, issued a statement saying that “I strongly support” legislation for a commission to tackle the nation’s fiscal problems. If he does, you’ve got to wonder where that strong support has been for the past year.

It’s not as if Obama lacked the power to veto spending measures; he simply lacked the will. It’s not as if he refused to go along with a health-care scheme that cooked the books by putting the Medicare “Doc Fix” in a separate bill; he cheered and insisted it would not add one dime to the deficit. (The real cost was closer to $2.5 trillion, not the less-than-trillion-dollar price tag he was peddling.) And of course the real concern (aside from the likelihood that the commission will bless a batch of new jobs-killing taxes) is that this will simply encourage him to do more of the same. The editors note:

Indeed, on Monday, two days after endorsing the commission, Mr. Obama made proposals that would, to put it charitably, increase its workload: bigger tax credits for child care and retirement. We were unable to obtain from the administration Monday any estimated cost of these new goodies.

One wonders why Obama doesn’t simply do his job and insist his congressional allies do the same. Send up responsible budgets, veto excessive ones, refuse to entertain omnibus spending gambits with thousands of earmarks, and eschew new entitlement programs. In other words, don’t do anything like he did in the first year of his presidency.