Corker says budget process is ‘broken’

Tennessee U.S. Sen. Bob Corker slammed what he calls a “broken” budget process in a Wednesday interview on CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”

The Senate Budget Committee member and former Chattanooga mayor said “playground bragging rights” on the budget “are not particularly interesting to me” and said Congress is using a “slush fund” called the Overseas Contingency Fund to go between $810 billion and $820 billion over spending levels set several years ago.

“It is a broken process … [and] what we really are doing is sending our young kids over the cliff as we spend more money than we should,” Corker said.

Corker called himself “one of the few guys left around here, I think, that cares about our fiscal issues” and invited critics to “throw tomatoes at me, if you will.”

“It has nothing to do with who won, who lost [in the omnibus negotiations]. I could care less about that. What I do care about is the longterm fiscal situation in our nation, and this bill doesn’t appropriately deal with that.”

He said Congress needs to get real about reducing spending and getting the nation’s finances in order, and called for a five-year military spending plan offset with cuts elsewhere.

“You cannot take 70 percent of our spending off the table. You just cannot do that. I’m sorry. [Medicare, Medicaid and Social Security are] not only where all the money is, [they are] where all the growth and spending is.

“If you’ve got a Congress and a president that says, ‘Hey, we’re not touching any of this, I’m sorry, this is not going to be part of our process,’ what you’re really doing is saying we have no desire to solve our nation’s fiscal issues. … I’m not going to vote for things that I know are just an obfuscation of our responsibilities.”