By SYDNEY J. FREEDBERG JR
SIMI VALLEY, CALIF.: “I don’t how we buy it back without a real bloodbath,” said Sen. Lindsey Graham. “It” is the $500 billion, 10-year cut to defense spending imposed by the Budget Control Act of 2011, popularly (mis)called sequestration. Graham, one of Donald Trump’s harshest critics in the GOP, is not alone in thinking the president-elect’s promise to undo the BCA and boost defense spending dramatically will be hard to fulfill.
“It’s going to be harder than it looks,” Graham said at the Reagan Library’s annual defense conference here, “but we will get there, because failure is not an option.”
Yes, the Republican party now controls the White House and both chambers of Congress. But in the Senate, with its institutionalized preference for obstructionism, you need 60 votes to pass anything significant. That means you need Democratic votes, and Democrats have demanded that each dollar of sequester relief for the Pentagon be matched by a dollar for domestic programs. That’s anathema to most Republicans — but, said Graham, “without increasing non-defense spending, I don’t think we get to sixty.”
Read the full story at Breaking Defense