House Armed Services Committee chairman Rep. Howard “Buck” McKeon doesn’t look like an insurgent. The quintessential Californian – a man of Reaganesque optimism whose congressional district now includes the Gipper’s presidential library – McKeon has been a steadfast supporter of House speaker John Boehner in turbulent times. Yet, to the green-eyeshade editorialists of the Wall Street Journal, McKeon is leading a “rebellion” of defense hawks, an “act of masochism” threatening the Holy of Holies: the sequestration provision of the Budget Control Act (BCA). McKeon’s crime is that he’s hoping for a 2014 budget deal that would reduce the amount of defense sequestration by half.

The BCA has, as the Journal argues, marginally reduced federal spending, although the paper skews the numbers by comparing figures from 2011 to 2013.  Overall federal outlays went down by about $150 billion in that period, but the roughly half of the reduction came from “ending” the war in Iraq and the surge in Afghanistan; “overseas contingency operations” spending went from $165 billion to $95 billion.  Conversely, the BCA and sequestration did nothing to curb the rise in “mandatory spending,” which rose by about $200 billion from 2011 to 2013.