Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham, deficit peacocks (Kevin Lamarque/Reuters)
It's a well-worn theme around the
lefty blogosphere, but always worth pointing out. No, Republicans don't actually care about the deficit.
Case in point:
Under the current law, half of the automatic spending cuts, if triggered, would fall on defense programs and the other half on domestic programs.
Republican Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham are collaborating on legislation that would undo at least some of the automatic spending cuts aimed at the Pentagon.
"He reserves the right to pursue all options to ensure that any cuts mandated by a sequester don't leave us with a hollow military," said McCain spokesman Brian Rogers.
Graham and McCain, of course, are also the leaders of the keep Guantanamo open caucus, another budget busting effort.
The Pentagon detention center that started out in January 2002 as a collection of crude open-air cells guarded by Marines in a muddy tent city is today arguably the most expensive prison on earth, costing taxpayers $800,000 annually for each of the 171 captives by Obama administration reckoning.
That's more than 30 times the cost of keeping a captive on U.S. soil. [...]
Congress, charged now with cutting $1.5 trillion from the budget by Christmas, provided $139 million to operate the center last year, and has made every effort to keep it open—even as a former deputy commander of the detention center calls it "expensive" and "inefficient."
"It's a slow-motion Berlin Airlift—that's been going on for 10 years," says retired Army Brig. Gen. Greg Zanetti, a West Point graduate who in 2008 was deputy commander at the detention center.
Graham and McCain, along with most Republicans and far too many Democrats, are happy to keep that sinkhole existing for the duration, whatever that duration might be, deficit be damned.