Defense Cuts Will Send House Republicans into Turmoil

Julia Ioffe: “Most of this will play out, just like the Speaker’s battle, inside the Republican conference. It will pit traditional Republican hawks against MAGA Republicans who think, as the Hill Republican told me, that ‘support to non-Americans, the people who don’t have a little American flag next to their name, is a waste of tax-payer dollars,’ and it will all be adjudicated by a Speaker who believes in nothing but burnishing his own resumé.”

“Consider this: there’s a number being bandied about in Washington these days, $75 billion. That’s the number that McCarthy has promised to slash off the Pentagon budget this year because that’s the number by which the Pentagon budget increased last year. But guess what? The reason it increased by that much in 2022 was because of a concession Democrats made to Republicans, who wanted more defense spending, not less. As they say about our lovely Mid-Atlantic, if you don’t like the weather, wait half an hour.”