Defense cuts in crosshairs

No one should have questioned Sen. Pat Roberts’ candidness when he appeared here Monday morning at Allen Community College.
When asked about gridlock in Congress, he allowed the federal legislative bodies weren’t “quite as popular as lice or a colonoscopy.”
But the Washington veteran, who served 16 years in the House before taking a Senate seat in 1997, didn’t depend on wit to engage his audience, a mix of ACC students and local citizenry, who came with questions for Roberts, 76.
He explained why he was one of 22 senators who voted against reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act earlier this month. A handful of women held signs deploring his vote outside ACC’s technology and theater building, where Roberts spoke.
He said he had voted in favor of the measure twice previously, but this time was opposed because of provisions inserted by President Obama and Harry Reid, Democratic president of the Senate, among them efforts to tamper with court enforcement.
However, he saved his strongest words in a short pre-question commentary for the pending sequester.
“What does that mean,” he asked several times before a student, with a little coaxing, identified the process as a mandatory cut in spending.
It will occur on March 1 if Congress does nothing, and has cuts that will reduce the $3.6 trillion budget by $85 billion, or a little over 2 percent.
“You’re going to hear a lot of hollering and screaming,” said Roberts, and that the sequester flew in the face of 43 new programs Obama proposed during his State of the Union address last week. “He says they’re not going to cost a single dime, but how do you do that?”
The sequester, he continued, is advertised as a means of getting control of the budget, but, in Roberts’ opinion, unfairly cuts spending for national defense and security.
“The most important things the federal government does is provide for individual liberties and security,” he said, and that with the defense budget already reduced to $750 budget, further cuts would weaken the nation’s ability to respond to threats.
The better approach, he said, is to identify and propose spending cuts through work with agencies and congressional committees — for the process to work as it did for many years, by bringing together those on both sides of the aisle.

IN ANSWER to a question about arms shipments to Egypt — 40 F-16 fighter planes and 200 Abrams tanks — Roberts said the Arab Spring had turned into the Arab Nightmare.
“Now isn’t the time to send arms to Egypt,” he said, although the sales are part of a contractual obligation made in previous years.
As for Benghazi, Roberts said lack of intelligence and contingency planning led to the debacle.
“We could have sent in the Marines and gotten our ambassador out,” he said. “We have a bond in the U.S. that someone always has your back,” which evaporated when the state department didn’t ask for assistance.
Roberts said he wasn’t keen on imposing term limits.
“If you want to keep someone, you can’t,” he said. “But, if you want to kick a bum out, you can do that every two years in the House” and every six years in the Senate. “Most people don’t want people who don’t share their views.
“The average term in the House is eight years now,” he added.
As for defense cuts, Roberts, the senior Marine in the Senate, pointed out Marine Corps strength had been cut to three divisions, 180,000 Marines, with the sequester projected to reduce strength another 20,000.
“Today we have a division for the Pacific — which eventually may not be enough — one for the Atlantic and one in the U.S.,” he said. “The Navy is at about what it was at the end of World War II. The Chinese navy is ahead of us.”
What should occur, he said, is to fashion defense spending by looking at critical threats based on intelligence.
He agreed that the U.S. spends more than China and Russia combined on defense — actually more than all other countries combined — but “we are the leader of the free world,” and the budget should be based on what is reasonably necessary.

ARRIVING at solutions in Washington may be at a logjam, Roberts admitted, but in comparison to the past it may not be as bad as it seems.
He mentioned the Vietnam War, which “tore the country apart,” as well as Watergate, the Iran Contra Affair and the impeachment of President Clinton.
The difference today, with a $16.5 trillion debt, is that the nation’s economic future seems at peril for young people and senior citizens, many of whom depend on Social Security and Medicare, he said.
“We’re reaching the point where interest on the national debt will be greater than discretionary spending,” Roberts forecast. “What we have is a spending problem,” one that often is defined on a partisan basis.
“I think most Americans want certainty” in the nation’s economic future, “and the process is frustrating,” he said.
Immigration demands “something that works,” Roberts said. “First, we have to secure our borders, which is doable” and should focus on trouble spots, such as tunnels linking Mexico and California.
“We also need a program that works for the 11 million (undocumented illegals) who live in the shadows. We want them to raise their hands, but that’s not going to work.”
The last major federal highway bill was voted in 1993, he said, and the interstate highway system, which in places has fallen on hard times, is a feature that means much to the nation’s infrastructure.
“We need to plan but that’s not going to happen without a budget,” he said.

ROBERTS encouraged his listeners to “keep the faith. We have a great country. We can work our way out of our problems, but we can’t do it without your help.”