The most unheralded achievement of the Republican Congress over the last four years has undoubtedly been the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA), which has shrunk the size of government more effectively than any budget tool in a generation. A sign of how well the budget caps and across-the-board spending cuts called “sequester” have worked is how much President Obama and left-wing special-interest groups have come to despise what the president calls this “mindless” spending-reduction formula.
But for a growing number of congressional Republicans — especially the appropriators — this success has become too much of a good thing, and they are looking to undo some of the sequester-imposed cuts. President Obama is enticing members concerned about national security by offering to devote half of the extra spending to beefing up the defense budget. If Republicans get suckered into this fiscal jailbreak, it will effectively kill the sequester for good and give a green light to the Obama budget blowout, which would add nearly half a trillion dollars of spending over just three years. All the hard-fought fiscal gains would be lost. Fiscal conservatives would be smarter to force Obama to comply with the sequester and overall caps while shifting spending within the caps from domestic to defense programs.
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