Excerpt:
On Monday, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and his running mate, Rep. Paul Ryan, were sharply criticized over their commitment to reverse massive budget cuts Team Obama is making at the expense of our military capabilities and national security.
What made this attack notable – and potentially very damaging to the GOP standard-bearers – is that it came, not from the Democrats, but from a prominent Republican political operative, Grover Norquist. It is hard to see how his contention that Messrs. Romney and Ryan can't be trusted to spend wisely on defense will help anybody but their opponents.
In remarks to the bipartisan Center for the National Interest, Norquist threw down the gauntlet to the Republican ticket. He declared he would fight defense spending increases, or even relief from the next, debilitating round of cuts. These amount to a further half-a-trillion dollars in across-the-board cuts over ten years under what has been called a "doomsday mechanism" known on Capitol Hill as "sequestration." What makes matters much worse is that these cuts come on top of nearly $800 billion in Pentagon budget reductions already in the pipeline – a fact the anti-tax activist studiously ignores.