McCain And Coburn Take Steps Showing Progress In Budget Debate
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The two gray-haired Republican senators put the brakes on the Senate's Continuing Resolution bill. (Talk News Radio Service, Creative Commons)
Fresh off the heels of yet another Paul Ryan bill that undoes every action Obama has taken since grade school, the two gray-haired Republican senators put the brakes on the hurried efforts to pass a bill to keep the government running past March 27.
Their objection: government funding for non-sensical budget items. One provision sets aside $15 million to allow the Department of Defense to spend five percent more on any contract bid coming from a Native Hawaiian contractor. Another provision stops the military from retiring the Sherpa C-23 aircraft; a plane that “the Army and Air Force no longer want or need.”
Their list of demands for changes to the bill goes on for a while, and is still growing. While most would not agree with every aspect of the Senators’ objections, we should at least be pleasantly surprised that we finally have an example of members of Congress approaching the budget in a non-ideological and non-partisan manner.
To top it all off, McCain and Coburn didn’t even demand that the Senate delay the debate for some obscene amount of time. The 2008 Republican nominee for President told Senate Budget Committee Chairwoman Barbara Mikulski that 12 hours would be sufficient to review the bill in its entirety.
McCain and Coburn’s objection is a small battle in the broader war for sensible debate in Washington. Now, if we could only get them to apply similar statesmanship to the debate over Obama’s nominees.
