House continuing resolution to restore $7B to military operations

March 4, 2013

POLITICO

DAVID ROGERS

House Republicans are proposing this week to restore upward of $7 billion to operations and maintenance accounts for the four military services hit hard by the automatic cuts that went into effect Friday night.

That’s the bottom line driving a hybrid spending bill to be unveiled Monday and intended to replace the stopgap continuing resolution or CR due to expire March 27.

The measure will keep in place the overall spending reduction known as the sequester ordered Friday. But in the case of the Defense Department, it substitutes an updated full-year budget that shifts money to address the GOP’s great Achilles’ heel: the serious danger to military readiness if the standoff with President Barack Obama drags on for months.

Republicans know they can’t sustain a long fight without addressing this vulnerability, but the CR is also a political tinderbox that could blow up despite all sides now insisting that they want to avoid a government shutdown.

Obama faces pressure as well to make some adjustments to try to end the costly impasse. And there is growing anger in Democratic ranks that he and Vice President Joe Biden did not do more to resolve the sequestration issue as part of the tax negotiations at the end of the last Congress.

One option, building off comments last week by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-S.C.), would be to rearrange the pieces of Obama’s “grand bargain” proposals to put savings first and then add revenues in tax reform.

“The bottom line is: We’re not going to do revenue to fix sequestration,” Graham told POLITICO. “I am not against taxes but we don’t need any more money to run the government. We need money to get out of debt.”

Indeed, Obama has put $900 billion in 10-year savings on the table, which roughly matches the $960 billion left to sequestration at this stage. The president has said repeatedly he is committed to this package, which includes about $200 billion in appropriations cuts but also some far-reaching changes in benefit programs that Republicans want.

By putting his savings up front, Obama might help the GOP get past the rhetoric that no revenues be part of a deal on sequestration. In turn, he would have to have a commitment locking in added revenues as part of tax reform.

In an interview aired Sunday on NBC News’s “Meet the Press,” Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) continued to take a tough line against new revenues beyond what the White House won New Year’s Day. And even in the pages of The Wall Street Journal, conservative economists such as Harvard professor Martin Feldstein — once a top economic adviser to Ronald Reagan — have championed a cap on tax expenditures to raise revenues. And moving ahead on corporate tax reform is one goal that the Republican business community and Obama appear to share.

To read more click here.

<- Go Back