Cancel the sequester — now

As stories spread about airline passengers waiting extra hours because of furloughs imposed by the sequester, and as monthly job reports begin to show the jobs-destroying impact of the sequester increasing, it is time to cancel the sequester.

End it. Stop it. Postpone it. Delay it. Best case: Just kill it. Now. 

House Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) recently claimed credit for the sequester as a major GOP success, and he deserves the greatest blame for the result, but the sequester is the illegitimate child of bipartisan parents including President Obama. 

The sequester fiasco embodies the worst of every major player in official Washington. Obama was eloquent, passionate and brilliant in his oratorical warnings and photo ops warning about the sequester while doing literally nothing to prevent. Listening to the president castigate the sequester and observing how he did nothing to prevent it, one might think someone else serves as president in the Washington he condemns.

Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.), the minority leader in the Senate, never missing an opportunity to abuse filibusters in the service of obstruction, prevented any good-faith attempt to avoid the sequester. Harry Reid (D-Nev.), the majority leader of the Senate, never missing an opportunity to surrender or lose to GOP filibusters, never tried to prevent the sequester after doing nothing between periods of lengthy Senate recesses. Boehner, as usual afraid of conservative Republican members of his conference and wary of his ambitious majority leader, not only did nothing to prevent the sequester but claimed credit for it as a GOP victory! 

Isn't it bottom of the barrel when the sequester tops a list of achievements? The sequester kills jobs while there are too many jobless. The sequester hurts Americans from coast to coast, from damage to mental health programs to furloughs that punish those who fly, from hurting programs that protect America against terrorists to hurting programs that help the neediest among us.

The sequester brings austerity when austerity is the 'king of dumb" policy for a nation with high joblessness and slow growth. At a minimum, the president and Congress should postpone the sequester, with no questions asked and no conditions attached, until economic growth and job creation improve. Even better they should repeal it and kill it and do their jobs as they were elected to do.

Until then, when any politician attacks the sequester, remember that the blame for the sequester may not be equally divided. But to answer the question of who did it, the answer is similar to the ending of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express: Who did it? They all did it.

Shame on them all.

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Military Leaders: Sequester Cuts Will Prevent Veterans From Accessing Mental Health Services

During a hearing before the House Military Personnel Subcommittee Wednesday, American civilian and military leaders issued lawmakers a stark warning: federal budget cutbacks under the so-called “sequester” will leave veterans with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) and other mental illnesses without access to the health care that they desperately need.

The sequester cuts will force multiple governmental departments to cut back on programs or eliminate them entirely. Charged with taking care of the staggering percentage of Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans with PTSD, the Defense Department has had to increasingly rely on civilian mental health specialists to address the backlog. In fact, out of the 2,118 psychologists, 809 psychiatrists, and 2,533 social workers now employed by the military — a substantial increase over past years — over half are civilians. But under sequestration, the Department has been bracing for massive cuts to this civilian workforce, and is preparing to send notices to “more than 800,000 Defense Department civilian workers telling them that once-a-week unpaid furloughs will begin in April and continue for 22 weeks.”

As Military.com reports, that is particularly problematic for the military when it comes to these civilian mental health specialists because “they have options to seek employment elsewhere” and might be tempted to do so seeing as they are not exempt from the furloughs:

Lt. Gen. Patricia Horoho, the Army’s surgeon general, has lobbied to exempt the mental health specialists from furloughs to retain them for treating PTSD. The Pentagon has said that 20 percent of the civilian workforce will be exempt from furloughs. However, it did not look like the mental health specialists would receive that exemption, said Col. Rebecca Porter, the chief of Behavioral Health in Horoho’s office.

“We value these individuals greatly,” Porter said of the mental health workers. “If they start to go out the door, it’s going to take a lot longer for us to rebuild that” mental health workforce, Porter told a defense writers breakfast Tuesday.

“We have in the past offered retention bonuses, but that’s not specifically on the table now,” said Porter, a former military police officer and now a clinical psychologist whose main task is treating PTSD in the Army.

Her comments echoed those of Gen. Ray Odierno, the Army’s chief of staff, who told a Senate hearing last month that “before sequestration, we allocated the dollars and positions to increase military and civilian mental health providers.”

“The problem is there are not enough out there,” Odierno said. “Now what’s going to happen is we’re going to have to reduce the number we already have.”

The officials’ testimony is a clear-cut demonstration of the real world consequences brought on by budget cuts that lawmakers and the media tend to discuss in rather shallow terms. Budget cuts to military health care programs are also particularly cruel considering the already-massive backlog of over 900,000 veterans’ benefit claims — a problem that will be exacerbated as more military personnel return home from the waning Afghan war. Those veterans will already be plagued by poverty and a bleak economic outlook when they return home — and under sequestration, their mental health care outlook is even worse.

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Duncan says he misspoke about ‘pink slips’ for teachers ahead of sequester

Education Secretary Arne Duncan said Monday he misspoke when he recently claimed schools were already firing teachers in anticipation of sequester cuts taking effect.

"When I said 'pink slips' that was probably the wrong word," Duncan said to reporters, according to multiple reports. "Language matters, and I need to be very, very clear."

The $85 billion in across-the-board spending reductions took effect on Friday after the White House and congressional lawmakers were unable to reach a deal to avert the automatic cuts.

Duncan said last week that a number of school districts around the country had already begun laying off teachers in anticipation to the cuts.

He was one of a number of Cabinet officials, who joined President Obama, in warning of the dire consequences of the cuts taking effect. Republicans, though, countered that the administration was attempting to scare the public in an effort to tilt negotiations over a replacement bill.

Duncan had specifically mentioned the Kanawha County school district in West Virginia as an example of a school that had begun firing staff because of the sequester. 

According to the Washington Post, however, officials in Kanawha County disputed that claim. District administrators said that while the sequester cuts would hurt the country, they would have cut jobs whether or not the sequester was triggered. 

The sequester cuts are unlikely to touch most of the country's school districts. 

On Monday, Duncan walked back his warnings.

"Because I wasn't as clear, the spotlight was put on me and that's never ever my goal," Duncan said according to CNN. 

"My goal here is to have the spotlight be on children and families, so when I said 'pink slips' that was probably the wrong word,” he added. “I should've used 'job eliminations,' 'positions eliminated.'"

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LaHood: FAA furloughs will be necessary if sequester takes effect

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood stressed Sunday that the Obama administration was not exaggerating the effects of looming sequestration.

LaHood, a former GOP congressman, had said at a White House briefing on Friday that the $85 billion in automatic cuts set to start going into effect on March 1 would require furloughs at the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and throw air travel in the country into a tailspin.

On CNN’s “State of the Union” on Sunday, the show’s host, Candy Crowley, pressed LaHood over the need for furloughs, saying the FAA’s budget for operations and facilities would still be higher than 2008 levels. 

But LaHood said furloughs would still be necessary, even after the department ended contracts and found savings elsewhere. “This is not stuff we decided to make up,” he said.

"This sequester is very serious business,” LaHood added. “And it requires us to make the reductions that we’re making. It requires us, as painful as it is, to furlough the people that we’re going to have to furlough.”

LaHood also put most of the blame for the impasse over the sequester on his former Republican colleagues in Congress, though he did urge the two parties to work together on a deal. 

“I’m a Republican. My audience is trying to persuade my former colleagues that they need to come to the table with a proposal, which frankly they haven’t done,” LaHood said.

“I also at that news conference said: ‘Everybody around here ought to go take a look at the “Lincoln” movie, where they did very hard things by working together,” he added.

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Panetta: Allowing sequester to happen would be ‘shameful’

Outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said Sunday that it would a “shameful, irresponsible” act for Congress to allow the automated budget cuts known as “sequestration” to take effect.

During an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” Panetta pressed lawmakers to find a way to avoid the cuts, slated to take effect on March 1, warning that it would impact the military’s preparedness.

“If Congress stands back and allows the sequester to happen, it would be a shameful, irresponsible act,” he said.

Congress set up the package of sweeping across-the-board budget cuts totaling $1.2 billion that would take effect if they could not reach a deficit-reduction agreement in the Budget Control Act of 2011.

More than $500 billion of the proposed cuts, which have been pushed back from its original December implementation date to this spring as part of the “fiscal cliff” deal, would fall on the Defense department.

Panetta said the department had begun to prepare for the possibility of steep budget cuts “because there are members up on Capitol Hill that are saying ‘we’re going to stand back and let sequester happen.’”

But he added “if sequester happens, it is going to badly damage the readiness of the United States of America.”

“If sequester goes into effect, and we have to do the kind of cuts that go right at readiness, right at maintenance, right at training, we are going to weaken the United States and make it more difficult to respond to crises,” Panetta warned.

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Reid insists on new revenue to turn off sequester

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) on Sunday insisted that any upcoming deal to avoid sequestration would “without any question” need to include new revenues.

“The American people are on our side. The American people don't believe in these austere things. We believe that the rich should contribute. We believe we should fill those tax loopholes, get rid of them, I should say. And that's where we need to go,” said Reid in an interview aired on ABC’s “This Week.”

The sequester cuts, delayed two months by “fiscal cliff” deal reached in January, are now scheduled to take effect on March 1.

Republicans say they conceded enough on tax revenues in the fiscal cliff deal, but Democrats say any new deal must include both equal spending cuts and revenue increases, with a target of $600 billion in new tax revenues.

Last week, House Budget Committee Chairman Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) predicted the “sequester is going to happen” and blamed Democrats for not proposing alternative spending reductions.

“We think these sequesters will happen because the Democrats have opposed our efforts to replace those cuts with others and they’ve offered no alternative,” Ryan said.

But Reid on Sunday said a solution could be found and expressed openness to some suggestions from 2012 GOP presidential nominee Mitt Romney to shutter tax loopholes and eliminate deductions in the code. 

“The American people need to understand that it's not as if we've done nothing for the debt. $2.6 trillion already we've made in cuts. And all those cuts have come from non-defense programs,” said Reid.

“We need to keep our eye on the prize and continue doing something about spending, but I think that what we need to do is do some of the things that Mitt Romney talked about. He said there's some low-hanging fruit; there are a lot of tax loopholes that should be closed. I agree with him. We haven't done that,” he added.

Reid also joked that he was a “bad cop” during the fiscal-cliff debate over the New Year’s weekend, but was now ready to be a “good cop” in the next set of fiscal debates. 

“I'm a good cop now. … I have a good relationship with Mitch McConnell. I really admire, I think Boehner's, has the best he can. He's had a tremendous burden. I mean, he's had those Tea Party folks, but even they recognize that they don't have the clout that they thought they had, and that's why we were able to get the debt ceiling extended,” he said.

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