Faced with a massive military spending increase proposal from President Trump, and a Budget Committee which expected to well exceed even that, the House Armed Services Committee has decided to outdo everybody by advancing its own $640 billion base budget.

The sequestration figure for the spending budget is $549 billion. The sequestration figures, of course, have always been circumvented at any rate, but President Trump’s $603 billion proposal was far above the usual levels of excess spending. Even then, it was quickly attacked by Congressional hawks as insufficient. The Budget Committee was expecting this to be settled somewhere around $621 billion.

Committee Chairman Rep. Mac Thornberry (R – TX) insisted he wanted this even higher figure for awhile, but suggested he might be willing to tolerate a slightly lower final number, if it came with guarantees that spending in future years would remain high.

Ironically, Thornberry cited sequestration as one of the main reasons he thinks spending needs to be so huge now, intending to make up for the lower budgets of prior years, despite the plain fact that prior years of sequestration never actually happened, and “emergency” spending bills were always tacked on to well exceed the caps.