On
Wednesday, the House passed the “No Budget, No Pay Bill” which
will temporarily suspend the nation’s debt ceiling until May 19th.
Included in the measure is a
provision
that would withhold congressional pay after April 15th and extend until
Congress passes a budget.
During a press conference, in the middle of
the House vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid said the Senate would
take up the House measure “as is,” and the president is expected to sign
it.
The Hill
reports thirty-three Republicans voted against it because it didn’t include any
spending cuts, but eighty-six Democrats voted for it with the final vote being
285-144.
Representative Paul Broun (R-GA), a former Marine Corps reservist and Navy officer, says he was willing to go
along
with it, since no other viable solutions were on the table. “I’m very
unhappy, especially as a member of the military, that we’d be having any
more defense cuts,” he says. “But if the sequestration does occur, then
I’ll support those cuts. I think it’s necessary to make those real
kinds of cuts, and then hopefully we can restore military spending and
offset it with other spending cuts elsewhere.”
The sequestration is now pretty much a certainty. Additionally,
Boehner promised five influential conservatives he would push a budget
that would balance in ten years and keep spending levels at or below
those set under the sequestration’s cuts.
A senior GOP aide has pointed out that sequestration lacks “the cliff like finality” of default and can be
dealt
with more easily, retroactively, through legislation to restore defense
spending. That being said, getting a bill through congress is often
easier said than done.
The budget debate that will now ensue is made up of three
components:
1) Debt ceiling
2) Sequestration
3) Budget expiration
The debt ceiling deadline, which was previously set for February, has now been
postponed until late Spring.
The sequestration was enacted during the last debt limit debate in
2011 and places caps on discretionary spending and also deducts
approximately one hundred billion dollars from this year’s budget.
Though Senator Patty Murray, incoming Chair of the Senate Budget
Committee, had said that she would move a package of cuts to replace the
sequester, House GOP Leadership indicated, prior to Wednesday’s vote,
that they were willing to allow the sequester cuts to take effect.
Then, there’s the long overdue budget. The Senate has failed to pass a
budget for the past four years, which has subsequently spawned a series of
continuing resolutions, adopted in order to keep the government
running.
On several occasions, over the past year, Defense Secretary Leon
Panetta expounded upon the serious risks involved in allowing the
sequestration to go through. Panetta had asked Congress to come up with
debt reduction ideas that would
halt any of the defense cuts scheduled to kick in. It is tantamount to “putting a gun to our head,” he said.
In addition to national security concerns, several states such as
Florida, North Carolina and Georgia that are home to military
installations are anxious about the potential economic hardships,
including high unemployment, their respective states will face due to
sequestration.
How will sequestration impact the military? According to
U-T San Diego:
- Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta says the cuts would gut the
military, making it incapable of conducting maintenance, training our
troops, developing and acquiring new equipment and, most importantly,
executing the national security strategy.
- Thousands of civilian employees will be furloughed, freezing all
civilian hiring, laying off temporary hires and not renewing contracts
with term employees.
- All travel and training will be significantly curtailed.
- Administrative overhead and facilities programs will also be cut.
- Because of the long lead time requirement, DOD has approved the
cancellation of all third- and fourth-quarter ship and aircraft
maintenance activities effective February 16.
- All research and development contracts greater than five hundred million dollars are
slated to be slashed, a severe blow to the future of our war fighting
capabilities.
- Naval officials have testified before Congress that the barely
adequate force of today’s 287 ships would decrease to 230 combatants –
meaning maintaining “freedom of the seas” would be problematic.
- Aviation assets would be cut approximately twenty percent.
- The nation’s combat readiness and homeland security threat level
preparations would be reminiscent of – but worse than – the hollow
forces of the 1970s and ’90s.
At the same time, threats to US national security haven’t gone
away. Contrary to Obama’s repeated assurances, Al Qaeda remains a
threat to Americans located in various parts of the world.
Additionally, the so called Arab Spring continues in Northern Africa
while an often overlooked terrorist group,
Boko Haram, continues to pose a threat to the US,
according
to the Department of Homeland Security. Add to those the resurgence of
Russia, the rise of China, North Korea’s continuing taunts and Iran
burgeoning nuclear program. And, we have an open border.
The first responsibility of Congress, stated in the United States
Constitution, is to provide for the common defense. And the first
defined responsibility of the president is that of commander in chief.
So, it would appear that the Constitution places a distinct emphasis
on the defense of the nation and it is clear that the burden of this
responsibility falls directly on the legislative and executive branches.
In their pre-election chatter, leadership in both the executive and
legislative branches promised that sequestration would never happen.
They knew how damaging the effects would be on national security and on
jobs. But, at the eleventh hour, the old Congress punted to the new
Congress, giving them just two months to sort everything out.
But, Congress has shirked its responsibilities and in doing so, has
placed our economy and our national security in the balance. Due to a
lack of proactivity, partisan interests and lack of courage, the country
is being forced forward into an uncertain future fraught with a high
potential for disaster.
