Next week the GOP will introduce its first budget since taking control of the Senate as well as the House. Early indications are that it will bitterly disappoint the voters that rallied this past fall to send serious, national security-credentialed people to the Hill such as new Sens. Tom Cotton, Joni Ernst and Dan Sullivan. Almost every Republican ran on rebuilding a Pentagon ravaged by “sequestration.” No one campaigned on “keeping the cap” on the Department of Defense.
Other interviews I conducted this past week — with Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Mac Thornberry and South Dakota Sen. John Thune — left me with the distinct impression that the GOP budget about to be unveiled will either “keep the cap” or at best pull some budget tricks to slightly supplement DoD’s budget.
This would be a national security disaster and a political nightmare. The just completed Department of Homeland Security funding fiasco was mostly ameliorated by the intervention of the Federal district court injunction halting the president’s wildly unconstitutional approach to immigration unilateralism, and the Fifth Circuit kept that injunction in place so the shock among the grassroots was muted.
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