The politics of sequestration: 2012.

• Author: Kramer, Robert
• Position: WASHINGTON BEAT

If this were a normal election year, the president's budget would be declared dead on arrival, the Republican-led House of Representatives would produce an equally partisan response and the Democratic-majority Senate might or might not add a third, similarly political riposte. Then all parties would settle down to cobbling together appropriations bills, continuing resolutions and perhaps an omnibus spending bill to fund the government into the next fiscal year and past the election.

That is, if this were a normal election year.

Unfortunately, at the end of this session the convergence of two poorly-timed legislated events has left President Barack Obama and Congress with an almost unprecedented opportunity for serious political mischief. On Dec. 31, 2012, nearly all the 2001 and 2003 tax cuts, including the existing personal tax rates, will expire.

Beginning in January 2013, due to the inability of the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction--the Super Committee--to come to agreement on reducing the deficit, the Budget Control Act of 2011 (BCA) mandates that Congress sequester $1.2 trillion in spending over 10 years, meaning an immediate 9 percent cut in federal discretionary spending.

Though Obama has threatened to veto attempts to undo the sequester, neither side really wants the process to play itself out as written in the law. Take defense spending for example. The president's budget reduces defense spending 1 percent to a base of $525.4 billion, a meager down payment toward a total reduction of $486.9 billion by 2021.

But these cuts are part of the administration's new defense strategy-The sequestered defense funding of roughly $500 billion over 10 years would come on top of this, and both Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff have warned that additional cuts of this magnitude would seriously compromise military operational readiness and performance.

Administration and Republican Views Differ

The president's budget comes at this issue from a different angle. Under the Bush administration, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were funded separately from the regular defense appropriations process through the use of "supplemental." As a way to get a handle on escalating spending, President Obama pledged to bring war spending into DoD's base budget, which he did largely by FY2011. Once on budget, as the wars wind down, cost savings are scored by the Congressional Budget Office as reductions in the budget deficit.

The...