The umbrage that is being taken by President Obama at the refusal of the Congress to fund his next year is quite something. The moment deserves to be described with greater clarity than has been the case so far. This struck us in the run-up to the so-called “shutdown,” when the politicians — and the press, for that matter — were talking about the desire of the House to “defund” Obamacare.

The phrasing makes us wonder whether we missed something. Is it the case that Obamacare had been funded and that the Congress was taking away money that’s already been authorized and appropriated? Some of it is funded, some of it is not yet. It strikes us that the more accurate way to put things would be not that Congress was de-funding Obamacare but that Congress was refusing to fund Obamacare in first place. Or even that the Congress was refusing to borrow money to fund Obamacare in the first place.*

Our fiscal crisis, of course, involves more than Obamacare. It is a case of President Obama getting ahead of his sources of funding. He is like the buyer of a house who put down money without a financing contingency only to act as if he has been done an injustice when the financing fails to materialize. This was never more evident than in Mr. Obama’s bizarre statement in the White House press room last night, when he suggested that the Congress somehow has a constitutional responsibility to pass his budget.

“Of all the responsibilities the Constitution endows to Congress,” he claimed, “two should be fairly simple: pass a budget, and pay America’s bills.” Where does the Constitution say that? We took a copy of that parchment and dissolved it in alcohol and put the entire solution through one of the Sun’s Constitutional Plasma Spectrographs, and we couldn’t find one particle, not one gluon, of a reference to a budget.

It is true that the Congress has the power to pass a budget. This is the first item in Article 1, Section 8, where it says that the Congress “shall have Power To lay and collect Taxes, Duties, Imposts and Excises, to pay the Debts and provide for the common Defence and general Welfare of the United States.” But blamed if we can see where it must do that and do so on the terms the President — any president — demands.

What we do see is that woe betide the president, or any officer of the United States, who gets ahead of the Congress on this head. That’s because of the next section of the Article 1, Section 9, which lists the primary things the government can never do. One of the most famous is this: “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law.” In other words, the government mayn’t spend what Congress fails to provide. The truth is that the refusal of the Congress to fund the Obama administration is a vote of no confidence in the President’s program that no amount of umbrage can hide.

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* Appropriations for Obamacare by year going forward are charted starting at page 20 of this document from Congressional Research Service.