Some conservative lawmakers view the cuts as money in the bank. | REUTERS Senate GOP may foil sequester fix

Not everyone in Washington is so desperate to avoid sequestration.

A handful of Senate conservatives have been gaming out ways to block a deal, if they consider it a bad one — even if it means letting billions in across-the-board cuts go through, according to GOP sources on Capitol Hill.


The issue: Republican budget hard-liners fear that the White House, congressional Democrats and their own party leaders will try to replace or forestall the cuts with budget gimmickry or new taxes. They worry that “fake” cuts — savings that would have happened anyway or other accounting tricks — will become increasingly popular, even for moderate Republicans, as the zero hour approaches for the Defense Department.

In private sessions, these Republicans have begun laying plans to block a big, bipartisan agreement, either by pressuring GOP leaders not to give ground or using the congressional rulebook to slow-walk the process.

It is too early to tell what will come down the pike, and the discussions are preliminary, Republican sources cautioned.

But the conservative lawmakers are “concerned” that leaders could “use the sequester as leverage to get a bad deal” through Congress, one senior GOP aide told POLITICO.

They view the cuts as money in the bank, the silver lining of an August 2011 Budget Control Act, the debt-limit deal that gave Congress the choice of coming up with $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years or letting automatic cuts to defense and domestic programs take effect on Jan. 2, 2013.

“Whatever you say about the cuts, and we all opposed the BCA, it was a big victory for those wanting to cut spending,” said a Senate Republican source. “To then turn around and replace that with revenue” — or unrealistic future cuts — “is going to be a very hard thing to overcome on our side.”

For a variety of reasons, many fiscal conservatives voted against the budget control measure, which set up the sequestration process. The irony now, Republican sources say, is that folks who voted for the sequester are the most eager to get rid of it and lawmakers who voted no are more willing to let it take effect.

The official line from most conservatives is that the planned cuts to the Pentagon would devastate the nation’s defenses and they should be replaced by reductions to domestic programs or other budgetary offsets that don’t involve raising taxes.

Congressional Democrats and White House chief of staff Jack Lew, the point man in constructing the sequester, wanted a way to force Republicans into choosing between defense cuts and tax increases, sources said at the time. House Democrats tried to make that choice more stark for Republicans earlier this month by drafting legislation that would have replaced the defense cuts with tax increases. But the GOP blocked the measure from coming up for a vote.

“The holdout has been that Republicans are much more interested in protecting tax breaks for special interests, like tax breaks for big oil companies, than they are in protecting defense spending,” said Maryland Rep. Chris Van Hollen, the top Democrat on the House Budget Committee and a negotiator on the 2011 budget deal.

It’s not quite that cut and dried. Republicans are in a box — partly of their own making — that pits two cornerstones of their platform against each other: robust national defense and low taxes.

Rep. Trent Franks (R-Ariz.) recently told POLITICO that Republicans had been “outflanked” by Democrats when they signed off on the deal to raise the debt limit last August and put the Pentagon on the chopping block.

Some defense hawks are so worried about shrinking the Pentagon’s budget that they have floated the idea of offsetting the cuts with new revenue. Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), the GOP’s 2008 presidential nominee, raised that idea in June when he was working with Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to find a way to spare the Pentagon.

On Monday, McCain and Levin were among six senators who echoed Obama’s call for a “balanced” approach to replacing the sequester with another deficit-reduction package — Washington code for including tax revenue.

“[W]e are committed to working together to help forge a balanced bipartisan deficit reduction package to avoid damage to our national security, important domestic priorities, and our economy,” the senators wrote. Republicans Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Kelly Ayotte of New Hampshire and Democrats Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island and Jeanne Shaheen of New Hampshire joined McCain and Levin in signing the letter.

If Congress doesn’t act to stop it, the sequester will be triggered on Jan. 2. Across-the-board cuts will be applied to most defense and domestic programs. But Republicans see an imbalance in what was billed as an equal haircut for the Pentagon and nondefense programs. The big entitlements were mostly exempted from cuts. Social Security and Medicaid won’t be touched at all, and cuts to Medicare were limited to 2 percent.

While immediate war-fighting functions and military pay are also exempted from the sequester, most Pentagon programs are about to go under the knife. There is particular concern about the ability of DOD to acquire weapons and equipment, as well as the possibility that contractors, both large and small, will lay off employees in response to a reduction in the money they get from the government.

Because so many political sacred cows are in line to become hamburger meat, the conservatives realize they will be fighting a delicate and difficult battle if they end up taking the position that sequestration is better than whatever alternate deal has been cut. Moreover, there won’t be any real deal making until the post-election lame-duck session of Congress, and it’s not clear yet what they will be up against.

But history has taught them that Washington negotiations seldom lead to hard spending cuts, and they worry that they’ll lose the “dollar for dollar” deal that they got last year.

At the time, the government was bumping up against its borrowing cap, the so-called debt limit. Republicans insisted that for every dollar by which they agreed to raise the debt limit, Democrats agree to an equal dollar amount in cuts to government programs. For Republicans, that was the heart of the agreement.

Now conservatives are “frustrated about the willingness to walk away from the dollar-for-dollar commitment,” said an aide to a conservative member of the Senate. The aide said some senators may push to let the sequester take effect rather than “abrogating that commitment.”

As for making that happen, the Senate GOP source said, “The conservatives in the Senate are always prepared and looking for ways to utilize their leverage outside the chamber and inside the chamber to stop really bad stuff and also to help our House allies.”