House is going back on its word by undoing deficit deal
Speaker of the House John Boehner discusses the debt-ceiling situation with reporters in Washington. Credit: Getty Images, 2011
The House of Representatives reneged on a key deficit-reduction deal recently. It passed a bill authorizing more military spending in 2013 than was agreed to last summer in a bargain that ended the debt crisis in which the nation's credit rating was downgraded.
With deals on almost anything so hard to come by in Washington these days, Congress should at least live up to the ones it does manage to strike. The Senate should stick to the spending level set in last August's Budget Control Act as it hammers out its defense authorization bill for the budget year that begins in October.
The $642.5-billion House bill ups spending by $8 billion more than President Barack Obama and congressional Republicans agreed to at the time. It hikes the base defense budget to $554 billion, up from $530 billion, while cutting funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from $115 billion to $88.5 billion.
That's not much parsimony given the urgency Republicans attached to deficit-cutting when they held the nation's ability to borrow hostage in August.
The agreement reached then called for $900 billion in cuts over 10 years beginning in 2012, and an additional $1.2 trillion in automatic cuts -- half from domestic spending and half from the military -- slated to start taking effect in 2013. It's incredibly cavalier for the House to walk back the defense cuts and leave domestic programs as the main target for the budget knife.
The House bill will stoke other fights beyond how much to spend. It continues an outrageous detention policy that allows terror suspects, including American citizens captured in the United States, to be locked up indefinitely without trial.
It would fund a missile defense system for the East Coast that the Pentagon says is unnecessary. And it doesn't authorize a base-closing commission, even though military officials said there are bases they no longer need that should be shut.
Reasonable lawmakers can disagree on many of the policy and spending choices in the House bill. But Congress already had the fight over how much to spend for defense. And a deal's a deal.
