Politico reports the threat from the White House. I’m not buying it. The Senate Armed Services Committee is in a closed door mark-up of the defense authorization bill, and the White House is obviously concerned that they’re going to follow the lead of the House Armed Services Committee, which jammed more than $300 million back into the defense budget as a down payment on 12 more F-22s. Now Carl Levin can tell the Dems on that committee that it’d be a waste of time to follow suit, but does anybody believe that President Barack Obama is going to use his first veto on a defense budget that he thinks spends $300 million too much on fighter jets? Really? That’s only a little more than the stimulus was set to spend on resodding the national mall — an expense which Robert Gibbs zealously defended before the Dem leadership cut it from the bill out of some not-seen-since sense of shame. There are two reasons why the House shoved F-22 money back into the budget. First is jobs. There are a lot of jobs at stake and F-22 contracts are spread across 48 states. When the Obama administration and Congress are spending trillions of dollars on stimulus spending and health care and green energy and every other Democratic hobby horse, it’s not surprising that members would ask why a few hundred million to keep critical defense jobs in their district is considered by this adminsitration to be a waste of money. But the second reason for this sudden resistance to Gates decision to close down production of F-22 is that Congress has been told for years that 187 airframes is not enough for the Air Force to carry out its mission. While Gates claims that this isn’t the case — that 187 copies is enough — as one expert says, “he can’t show a lick of paper that confirms his decision was anything but a budget drill.” The press will play all this as Congressmen pushing constituent interests, but that’s only part of the story. Congress is also starting to push back against the Obama administration’s long-term vision for U.S. defense. In short, Congress is doing its job.
