Let’s see if you can figure out what Pew and the Washington Post left out of this poll question about blame for the sequester.  I won’t even give you a hint, even if Rovin had to tip me to this by e-mail:

Say, where is the option for Senate Democrats? It might be a secret to the Washington Post that Democrats control one chamber of Congress, but if they dug around a little bit, they might discover that Harry Reid runs the Senate.  Of course, that hasn’t meant much in the last four years of budgeting, as Reid and his caucus have ignored the law that requires the Senate to actually produce a budget, but still, they’re at least nominally an independent player in this battle.

By the way, if the Senate had followed the law and produced normal-order budgets, we wouldn’t have the sequestration at all. The budget resolutions of both chambers would have gone to conference committee, which would have hashed out the differences.  Obama would have signed the budgets, and we would have avoided nearly four years of crisis funding for the federal government.  Reid and Obama haven’t used normal order because they want to keep using continuing resolutions as a means to keep the inflated FY2010 spending levels as the baseline going forward, and especially because they want to keep House Republicans from having a real voice on spending and budgeting.

In this case, Pew and the Washington Post didn’t just leave out an option.  They left out the real culprit, both in the acute crisis (since the Senate still hasn’t produced a sequestration alternative in this session or the previous one) and in the chronic budget failure that produced it.