Recently, the Secretary of Defense, Ashton Carter, said he could not support the proposed 2016 Defense Budget if it put other agencies in jeopardy:
"This funding approach … reflects a narrow way of looking at our national security — one that ignores the vital contributions made by the State, Justice, Treasury and Homeland Security Departments," Carter told the Senate Appropriations defense subcommittee, "and disregards the enduring long-term connection between our nation's security and many other factors."
Seems like a good approach, right? Point out the very valid concern that non DoD departments also have responsibility for security of our nation and they deserve appropriate funding as well. It ended up being a big FAIL as Republicans in Congress berated the SecDef and that news made more headlines than the actual funding issues.
Yet Dems doubled down on this exact approach, hoping it might make a difference.
Yesterday, the Washington Post blamed President Obama and Democrats in Congress for setting unreasonable demands for their guaranteed support of the 2016 Defense Budget:
Now Republicans and Democrats accuse each other of taking the defense and domestic budgets hostage — and that’s where our sympathy for the president’s position ends. He’s helped set this blame game in motion, when his role as commander in chief should cause him to rise above it. We agree that discretionary programs need more money, and that some of them, such as Homeland Security and the State Department, pay security dividends as well. Sequestration should be reversed.
The irony? WaPo thinks there are problems with the proposed bill. And so do the Republican Chairs of both the HASC (Rep. Mac Thornberry - R-TX) and the SASC (Sen. John McCain - R-AZ):
The House Armed Services chairman, Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-Tex.), topped up the measure to the $612 billion level Mr. Obama requested by labeling $38 billion in permanent funding as “overseas contingency” money — which is emergency spending not subject to budget caps. The Senate committee adopted the same ploy, which its chairman, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.), previously derided as a gimmick, and which even Mr. Thornberry concedes is less than honest budgeting.
And today the bill passed the House, 269-151.
So how did the Dems lose control of the messaging?
We could just blame the press. After all, why aren't any major mainstream papers or news outlets talking about the "less than honest budgeting" in the titles of any pieces on the different versions of this bill?
Because people are so used to the word gimmick and the phrase less than honest as applied to Congress that they just aren't listening anymore. And feeding the folks that believe Obama can do nothing but bad is a guaranteed way to get your story shared. This is an uphill battle in multiple ways.
But the truth is that most people, including those over at War on the Rocks, see the supposed gimmick as the only way to solve sequestration in the short term:
The dramatically expanded Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) account is a gimmick or “work-around” to compensate for Congress’s inability to solve the Budget Control Act dilemma it created in 2011. No one in Congress likes it but even deficit-hawks like Senator McCain acknowledge that at present it is the only way to stem the decline of defense.
But there was a solution and maybe by discussing it here, we can convince Dems in the Senate to take a different approach. If there were reasons more everyday people hated this budget, Dems could easily rally more support. They can do this by framing the issue as a populist one.
Many people thought that sequestration would pressure the DoD to cut wasteful spending. Programs like the F-35, a plane that is not only over budget but continually reveals flaws that make it unlikely to be usable in the near future, are still priority number one for the DoD. Defense contractors will not be hurt in either of these budget proposals.
But sequestration is having a different impact all together. Force size is dropping yet our military commitments overseas seem to be expanding even though we have 'officially' ended two wars. That means more responsibility falls on fewer shoulders - shoulders that are already pretty well beat from more than a decade of war.
And it is these same people who will be thanked by Congress come Veterans Day this November 11 and thanked again by proposals to cut their salary and benefits when this budget proposal passes in December:
- Modernize military retirement by cutting pensions and replacing the cuts with a modified 401K plan (gambling military pensions on the stock market) (House and Senate bills)
- Provide a 1.3% Cost of Living Adjustment (COLA) which is .5% less than what Social Security will receive and a full percentage point below expected growth in private sector wages. It will be the fourth year in a row that COLA does not keep pace with the rate of inflation for military servicemembers. (back in January, some Dems proposed a 3.3% COLA for federal employees but no Dems are coming to the defense of military members, who can't unionize)(Senate Bill and President Obama)
- Cuts to the Basic Housing Allowance; this is added to last year's cut to the same allowance. It was only in recent years that the DoD finally brought BAH up to levels that were supposed to pay 100% of housing costs.(House)
- Increased co-pays for Tricare, the insurance program for military families (House)
These are Democratic issues but NO Democrat is talking about these issues to the press. Instead, they all keep repeating that Republicans used a gimmick and everyone tunes them out. The press is paying attention to the more quotable Rep. Thornberry however:
"The idea that we would hold the military and pay and their weapons and the policies involved hostage in the hopes we can put enough pressure to have the president and Congress somehow come together to fix these other problems, I just think that's unrealistic."
Seriously, folks, will Democrats never learn how to get ahead of the message?