Democrats push sequester, refuse alternative cuts

With just a few more days before March 1, it appears that across-the-board spending cuts once called “devastating” by Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta are going to be a reality. I am disappointed but not entirely surprised by this outcome.

This is just the latest example of the type of dysfunction in Washington that has led to Congress’ 10 percent approval rating. The American people are rightly confused when trying to understand how something that nobody wants and is widely believed will cause harm to our economy and national security — the sequester — can happen. Of course, it did not have to be this way.

The Budget Control Act, the legislation that raised the debt limit in August 2011, called for the creation of a bipartisan, bicameral committee — commonly known as the supercommittee — tasked with identifying
$1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years. However, President Barack Obama wanted to come up with an incentive to force the supercommittee to get a deal done. That incentive was the sequester.

Here is how it was supposed to work: If the supercommittee didn’t get a deal, automatic spending cuts of $1 trillion over 10 years, half from domestic and half from defense spending, would go into effect. The idea was to make the sequester cuts so Draconian and unpalatable to both Democrats and Republicans that members of the committee would hash out a deal. Well, they did not agree to a deal and the sequester is the result of that failure.

Immediately following the failure of the supercommittee, it was clear that the sequester cuts would, in fact, be devastating. In the House Armed Services Committee, we heard testimony about how the defense side of the cuts would hollow out our military forces and have disastrous consequences for our military members and their families. According to an article by this newspaper, even the Red Flag air combat training exercises at Nellis Air Force Base and Thunderbirds demonstration team won’t be spared from the broadax cuts of sequestration.

In the Education and Workforce Committee, we heard that job losses among federal contractors would threaten our fragile economic recovery. According to the Center for Regional Analysis, sequestration could cost the state of Nevada 4,000 jobs alone. Many of those losses would come at government contracting firms that do business with the Defense Department — there are several here in the Las Vegas Valley.

I have met with the owners of some of these companies. They are concerned about whether they would be able to retain their employees if the sequester is allowed to happen.

It is for those reasons that I joined my House colleagues in twice voting to replace the across-the-board, indiscriminate spending cuts of the sequester with commonsense spending reductions and reforms that address the federal government’s autopilot spending. Both pieces of legislation were added to the stack of bills upon which the Senate failed to act.

The White House recently announced that sequestration would be devastating and cost us jobs, yet it has not offered any tangible plan to replace those cuts. Senate Democrats are said to be drafting a plan to avert the sequester by raising taxes. Unfortunately, I fear that these efforts may be a case of too little, too late. The Democrats who control two-thirds of the legislative process in Washington were entirely absent from the debate over replacing the sequester when House Republicans first voted on a bill six months ago.

The facts of this case are clear: The sequester was the president’s idea, and he and others in the administration have admitted it would be devastating to our national security and economy, yet they have not offered any tangible plans to avoid the across-the-board cuts.

House Republicans have acted. But only in Washington can something like the sequester, denounced by both sides of the aisle, become reality. Responsible Democrats and Republicans in Washington can and must come together to identify spending reductions that will replace the first year of the sequester until a larger deficit-reduction agreement can be reached.

Joe Heck, a Republican, represents Nevada’s 3rd Congressional District in the House of Representatives. He serves on the House Armed Services Committee and is a colonel in the Army Reserve.