Senators quietly laying groundwork for looming defense sequestration fight
(note - this is a bipartisan group, not just Republicans. Graham has indicated he'd go along with tax increases if the additional revenue was earmarked entirely to defense. Military budget planners have been ordered NOT to plan on sequestration to devise scenarios for meeting the demands of sequestration. Paperwork trails like that, if leaked, would tell Congress there might be a way to deal with such drastic cuts.
…“They said they had all been ordered not to. It would be a violation. It would be a crime,” one participant told The Times.
An Army officer said, according to the participant: “I would be disobeying orders. I would be violating my orders and essentially committing a criminal act if I did any analytics on sequestration at this point.” MIC at the expense of everything else. ain't America great or what?) end of my rant; article follows.
By Carlo Munoz - 06/10/12
While it is all but guaranteed that Congress won't weigh in on how to handle the nearly $500 billion in looming defense cuts until after the presidential election, that has not stopped a handful of senators from laying the groundwork for that coming fight.
A bipartisan group of roughly 30 senators have been meeting behind closed doors on Capitol Hill, busily discussing possible funding alternatives that could be formulated into a compromise sequestration plan, according to members of a new debt reduction task force sponsored by the Bipartisan Policy Center.
The Pentagon is already staring down a roughly $450 billion decrease in spending spread across the next 10 years as a result of the debt deal lawmakers approved last August.
But after a bipartisan supercommittee, created as part of the White House's debt restructuring deal last year, failed to trim $1.2 trillion from federal coffers, DOD was saddled with an additional $500 billion in automatic cuts over the next decade under the sequestration plan.
Those automatic reductions would put the department in a nearly $1 trillion hole — a situation that top U.S. defense officials claim would break the back of the military.
http://thehill.com/blogs/defcon-hill/budget-appropriations/231931-senators-quietly-laying-groundwork-for-looming-defense-sequestration-fight-
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