Senate Budget Fight Poses Perils For 2016 GOP Presidential Hopefuls
WASHINGTON — The budget debate that kicked off on Capitol Hill this week forces difficult decisions on the four Republican senators eying a run for president in 2016.
Their votes could be critical to avoiding an embarrassing failure for the party, which needs 51 of its 54 senators to pass the budget resolution. It poses an early test for the four White House hopefuls by forcing them to reconcile the tough choices required to govern with their competing agendas and the lofty promises they're making to voters at an early stage in the race.
A key battle line is between military hawks and fiscal hawks. The automatic "sequestration" cuts are set to return this year and Republicans will have to choose between boosting defense spending or keeping the deficit down.
Of the presidential hopefuls, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-FL) have made clear they won't support a budget without a boost to defense spending. Both are trying to corner the foreign-policy-hawk wing of the GOP. So Republican leaders have found a creative way to satisfy that demand: use a reserve fund known as "overseas contingency operations" — or OCO — to inflate the amount of money available to the Pentagon in the short-term.
The other two contenders, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) and Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY), are wildcards who have been largely absent from the current budget debate. Both have voted against prior GOP budgets, complaining that they didn't move policy far enough to the right. The current Senate budget is even less far-reaching than the budgets they deemed insufficiently conservative.
more
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/dc/senate-budget-presidential-candidates
