The Worst Threat to America: A Partisan and Self-Paralyzed Congress

April 13, 2012

The next administration faces many critical national security risks in the coming years: the challenge from China; instability in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, and Mexico; the challenge of Iran; the unpredictable behavior of North Korea; and the continued threat of Islamic terrorism.

The uncertain threats in the outside world, however, may be far less critical than the threats that come from within the United States. The most obvious of these is sequestration. A partisan, self-destructive Congress passed a Budget Control Act that called for at least $2.1 trillion in budget cuts between 2012 to 2021, with the provision that if the committee—whose members proved unable to act in the past—could not agree, $900 billion in cuts would have to come from discretionary spending and half of that from national security, nearly doubling the $487 billion in cuts that are already underway. It was a bill that effectively attempted to force Congress to fix itself by the threat of doing something so stupid that even this partisan Congress would have to come to grips with the national interest.