BY TOM COLE President Obama spent the last press briefing of his
first term lecturing Congress to "pay the bills they have
already racked up." "They" is a curious choice of pronoun for a
president who has accumulated more debt than any chief executive
in history. The year President Obama was elected, the annual
deficit was $459 billion. His first year in office brought the
first $1 trillion deficit in U.S. history -- followed by the
next three. The president must think it a coincidence that a
Congress that had never produced a trillion-dollar deficit
before suddenly generated four in a row -- one for each year of
his tenure. Under the Obama administration, the national debt
has ballooned from $11 trillion and 70 percent of GDP to $16.4
trillion and 105 percent of GDP. The president's posture as a
bystander helpless to control a rogue Congress on a spending
rampage is severely undermined by the facts. President Obama's
first major act as president was to pass a "stimulus" bill with
a price tag of almost $1 tri