… applying the brakes to runaway federal spending will not be easy. As the first reaction to [Defense Secretary Robert] Gates’s announcement showed, whatever their proclaimed ideology, local politicians will squeal when their constituents feel the budget ax.
Among the first to challenge Gates’s decision to eliminate the Virginia-based military command was Virginia Gov. Robert McDonnell, a Republican who has not hesitated to trim spending proposals by his Democratic predecessors.
He was joined by the state’s two Democratic senators, Mark Warner and Jim Webb, who talk a good game of budgetary responsibility but squirm when it hits home.
Obama may have thought it was tough work to push Congress into spending all that he wanted for economic stimulus, education and other causes close to his heart. He is about to learn that nudging the lawmakers to trim the budget may be even tougher.
And the Progressives just love to serve up National Defense as their proposal for budget trimming!
Instead of trimming the parts of budget defining powers delegated to the Fed Govt by the Constitution, let’s try trimming the 2/3 of the budget that has no Constitutional justification at all. Then let’s see who squeals like a stuck pig.
get rid of Dept. of Ed. and bring salaries for govt. workers down to the level of the private sector, means test social security. But the NEA, SEIU and AARP will fight these respectively. Do Republicans have the resolve to do it? I don’t think so, it will take a group like the Tea Party to actually stand up to the powerful lobbies.
The problem is that we have systemic problems that transcend political parties. Both parties know that largess gets them elected. The current Constitution is a joke and routinely ignored by the Federal Government with the Federal Courts acting as sitting Constitutional Conventions amending the Constitution freely, only they call it “interpretation”. We need a Constitutional Convention.
Whether or not the Joint Forces Command is a waste of defense expenditures, the attempt close it by executive fiat is noisome politics of the first order.
Even though (and perhaps partially because) Virginia Senators Mark Warner and Jim Webb have been carrying Obama’s water faithfully, the electorate and therefore the state government has taken a decided turn to the conservative end of the political spectrum, and their tenure is likely to be limited.
With a popular conservative governor who has managed to balance the budget ( even if it was done with mirrors), and a popular attorney general who’s suit against Obamacare is progressing through the court system, Virginia outside of greater Washington D.C. is not the administration’s favorite place right now.
Unfortunately for Obama and Gates, the BRAC act is pretty specific about the procedures for closing a defense facility of the size of USJFCOM, and it will certainly survive until long after the next two national elections.
This is a petty political snit that will have no effect other than slowing or stopping the leftward slide of the Tidewater region as the court battles rage in the local media.
I’m an Air Force retiree. We got along fine before the Joint Forces Command came along, and we’ll do just as well after they’re deactivated.
I agree # 3 Br. Michael. That is why I constantly recommend that Christian avoid political and partisan labels in political debates (difficult to do), and work hard to bring explicitly christian principles to bear on the process. If not, we only reinforce the staus quo.
#3, I agree with your pain but would add this: the current Constitution, which is The Constitution of the United States, is not a joke.
Rather our respect (or lack thereof) is the joke; the attitude of self-serving polititions (98% of those in DC) is the joke.
The Constitution is still the God-inspired document it is. Calling IT the joke would be like slamming Chrisitanity because the Bible is a joke. The Bible is not the problem in Christianity, it is the fallen who shred it. Exacto same problem in government.
I disagree with any religious language applied to the Constitution. It is a human and flawed document. Think about how the enslaved Americans would have viewed the Constitution and its application. I reject completely any notion of American exceptionalism. We are a nation like any other nation. In other words, there is the City of Man and there is the City of God. We christian live in both, but belong to only the latter.
#8, I agree that the Constitution should not be called “God-inspired,” as if it were a Gospel. Yet, I would call it inspired by the principles and spirit of Christianity, and the amendments along the way would support that, as well as the Federalist Papers.
I whole-heartedly disagree with you that “we are a nation like any other nation.” We are not like Russia, China, Japan or any European country (so far). We are exceptional in the good we try to do around the world, in our work ethic, in our military efforts to help others, in our attempts to do justice and keep peace, and in our efforts to govern ourselves as a representative republic, which attempts to reach the fine balance between the sometimes cruel crush of majority rule and the impracticability of oversensitivity to minority desires (now call “rights”). (We are constantly on a continuum between those two extremes.)
We are flawed, of course. And we do not always put forth our best efforts. But our ideals are there to be followed. No other country in the world now or in history has had the ideals of our Constitution or our Declaration of Independence. But if you want to adopt the trendy idea of the left that America exceptionalism is a bad thing, prepare to be on the wrong side of history.
Thanks for responding Billy. I hear what you are saying; however, my assertion is that from a scriptural basis the united states does not hold a special place in the economy of God. Our country is one nation among nations. I love my country. But as a christian thinking theologically about political activities during these post-christian times, I will stick with Augustine – the city of man is temporal and flawed, not so the City of God (all ways the right side of history). He wrote this in the wake of the collapse of Rome, precisely because many Christians had come to believe in Roman exceptionalism and were shocked to discover that Roman society was not immune to the deterioriating forces of history. We are Christians first. And as the Church has had to distinquish itself and its mission from the political and social forms of the day, so not corrupt the message. In short, we too must recognize that today is such a day. These are the new Dark Ages. We need to re-learn the Lessons of St. Benedict.
Pax.