Obama cites Navy readiness threat
Immigrants freed as budget cuts loom
NEWPORT NEWS, Va, Feb 27, (Agencies): President Barack Obama on Tuesday warned of threats to Navy readiness and the government released hundreds of illegal immigrants due to budget pressure as automatic government spending cuts crept closer.
In the latest event staged by the White House to warn of the possible damage to public services, Obama spoke at the Newport News Shipbuilding shipyard where scheduled maintenance to the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln has been delayed by the budget crisis.
“The threat of these cuts has already forced the Navy to cancel the deployment, or delay the repair of certain aircraft carriers. One that’s currently being built might not get finished,” he warned.
The $85 billion across-the-board budget cuts are due to begin on Friday, and might eventually force the government to scale back on a host of services such as air traffic control, law enforcement and food safety inspections.
“These cuts are wrong. They are not smart. They’re not fair. They are a self-inflicted wound that doesn’t have to happen,” he told workers in Newport News, Virginia.
In a move criticized by Republicans as a dangerous political stunt, the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency released several hundred detained illegal immigrants in order to save money in preparation for the cuts.
Targeted
An agreement in Congress would halt the cuts, but with days to go before the ax starts to fall, the two parties do not agree on what to replace them with. There have been hardly any budget talks between the parties since New Year.
Republicans seek different, more targeted, spending cuts than entailed in “sequestration,” as the automatic cuts are known in Washington budget parlance. They complain that Obama is overplaying worries about sequestration to promote long-held plans to close tax loopholes.
House of Representatives Speaker John Boehner accused Obama of using “our military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes.”
Boehner, under pressure by conservatives not to cave to Obama’s demand for higher taxes, said members of the Democratic-controlled Senate need to “get off their ass” and pass legislation that would blunt the impact of the cuts.
In the Senate, Republicans struggled to come up with a unified plan for replacing the cuts, with Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell saying lawmakers should simply pass a law giving the president flexibility on how the reductions would be carried out. Obama rejected that idea.
In a sign of how far they are from halting sequestration, congressional Republicans and the White House have been trying to blame each other for the cuts, which both Democrats and Republicans agreed to in a 2011 plan to fix an earlier budget crisis.
“The president’s been running around acting like the world’s going to end because Congress might actually follow through on an idea he proposed and signed into law — all the while pretending he’s somehow powerless to stop it,” said McConnell.
Americans blame both Obama and congressional Republicans for the sequestration crisis, according to a Reuters/Ipsos online poll released on Tuesday.
Twenty-five percent of people said Republicans in Congress were responsible for sequestration, 23 percent blamed Obama and 5 per- cent pointed to congressional Democrats. Thirty percent said all of them were to blame.
With a trip to a defense-heavy region of the country, Obama is seeking to draw attention to how the cuts would play out in communities where the military is a major source of jobs.
Defense spending makes up 9.8 percent of Virginia’s gross domestic product.
But sequestration will be brought in gradually, and no shock to the economy is expected on Friday when it starts.
Impact
“The impact of this policy won’t be felt overnight but it will be real,” Obama said. “The longer these cuts are in place the greater the damage.”
The planned cuts will be phased in over seven months, giving lawmakers time to halt the worst effects, possibly in budget talks later in March.
But the Obama administration is highlighting a series of cuts to public services which are threatened.
The release of several hundred illegal immigrants due to budget pressures was criticized by the Republican head of the House Judiciary Committee as a political stunt to pressure Congress to put off sequestration.
“It’s abhorrent that President Obama is releasing criminals into our communities to promote his political agenda on sequestration,” US Representative Bob Goodlatte said in a statement.
President Barack Obama on Tuesday warned of potential devastation from looming spending cuts, but the bickering in Washington suggested lawmakers are too far apart to strike a timely compromise.
“Given the still-moderate underlying pace of economic growth, this additional near-term burden on the recovery is significant.”
The White House has warned of a “perfect storm” of widespread furloughs, nationwide airport delays and less secure US borders, and says pre-school programs could be canceled, teachers laid off and public services curtailed.
Republicans accuse the president of resorting to scare tactics and are balking at raising new revenue, after losing a showdown with the newly re-elected president late last year over raising tax rates on the rich.
They are willing to close loopholes, but only in the context of a sweeping overhaul of the tax system which could see rates for the wealthy fall. Republican House Speaker John Boehner accused Obama of using “military men and women as a prop in yet another campaign rally to support his tax hikes.”
And he denied Republicans had done nothing to stop the sequester, as the House has voted twice to reframe the cuts — though the bills lacked the revenue hikes Obama demands. “We should not have to move a third bill before the (Democratic-led) Senate gets off their ass and begins to do something,” Boehner boomed.
Several attempts were underway in Congress to give Obama authority to spread the cuts more evenly, but some Republicans saw such moves as an abrogation of their fiscal responsibilities. Reid introduced a Democratic bill to replace the sequester and wants it brought to a vote Thursday, while Republicans could introduce a competing version with a possible vote later this week.
The painful, automatic budget cuts were envisioned as a mechanism to defuse a previous spending showdown by forcing both sides into a deal to cut the deficit, but Washington is so dysfunctional that no agreement has been reached.