The GOP war over defense spending

With even Rand Paul going wobbly, it may seem like the Republican Party's brief foreign-policy debate is over. Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

But rumblings over the House GOP budget may prompt Republicans to debate war by other means.

House Speaker John Boehner and other Republican leaders want billions more for the war on terror even if it means a bigger deficit. But the House Budget Committee, now chaired by Tom Price of Georgia rather than Paul Ryan, advanced a spending blueprint without the additional defense funds, keeping within limits set by the so-called sequester.

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Boehner is threatening to add the $20 billion back in via the Rules Committee in order to win the votes of defense hawks. But a group of strong fiscal conservatives balked at a leadership-backed amendment containing the money.

The rebels reportedly included California Rep. Tom McClintock, South Carolina Rep. Mark Sanford, and Virginia Rep. Dave Brat, the man who unseated then–House Majority Leader Eric Cantor in a GOP primary last year.

More hawkish Republicans like Ohio Rep. Mike Turner, who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, say Price and company aren't spending enough. They threaten to vote against the budget resolution if that's not changed.

"The number is insufficient for what's necessary for national security," Turned told National Public Radio.

Arizona Rep. Trent Franks was more colorful. "We saved a little money in the '90s on surveillance and then two planes hit two buildings and cost us $2 trillion," he averred.

Outside commentators were also unsparing. The Washington Post's Jennifer Rubin blasted the House budget as "both a policy and political disaster," saying Price's committee "failed in its most essential duty."

"If the country wanted lawmakers to skirt their responsibilities and hobble defense," she added, "they would have elected Democratic majorities in both houses."

Hugh Hewitt warned in The Washington Examiner that "to double cross the base on defense spending would be an order-of-magnitude greater breach of faith."

The headline of Hewitt's column? "New GOP budget will be a national security disaster and political nightmare."

Enter John McCain, who wants to repeal the defense sequester and raise military spending to $577 billion. And Tom Cotton, the freshman Republican senator from Arkansas, would go further.

In his maiden Senate floor speech, Cotton cited the "recommendation of the National Defense Panel, which estimated that base defense spending for fiscal year 2016 should be $611 billion at a minimum." He noted that if defense spending was "merely" jacked up to 5 percent of GDP, "we would spend $885 billion on defense next year."

Too bad Tom Coburn isn't still in the Senate. The Oklahoma Republican regularly pointed out that bigger defense budgets don't always equal stronger national defense. He called the Defense Department the "Department of Everything."

"Billions of defense dollars are being spent on programs and missions that have little or nothing to do with national security, or are already being performed by other government agencies," he wrote in one of his famous compilations of government waste. "Spending more on grocery stores than guns doesn’t make any sense."

There's also the larger question of how much of our foreign policy constitutes national defense. Much of the $2 trillion Franks cited above wasn't spent to protect American skyscrapers or lives but to keep residents of foreign countries with age-old ethnic and religious rivalries from killing each other.

Meanwhile, it will be difficult for Republicans to deliver on their promises of low taxes and restrained spending at home while budgeting to police the world. Not only does this rule a large part of the federal budget off limits, but it essentially requires zeroing out non-defense discretionary spending (just as entitlements and interest payments on the national debt will exert downward pressure on defense spending).

To put it simply, even with unified control of the federal government, Republicans will be unlikely to ever have enough to power to enact and then sustain non-defense discretionary spending cuts of that magnitude over several Congresses.

It's also hard to win the argument that the Constitution gives Washington no power to spend money on education in the United States but carte blanche to build schools in Iraq, Libya, and wherever the McCain-Cotton world tour next takes us.

The GOP's old hawkish consensus is back for now, but the difficulty of fighting the neoconservatives' wars with the supply-siders' tax rates is going to upset it again.