Senator Roy Blunt commented Thursday on the Senate’s lack of progress on spending cuts and says the current Sequestration Bill is not the way to go.
The Sequestration bill levels across the board spending cuts at the Defense Department, and is an attempt to reduce defense spending without crippling the department. But Blunt doesn’t want to see defense cuts everywhere, he thinks cuts should hone in on problem areas.
That’s the essence of the bill he co-sponsored with Senator James Inhofe earlier this week.
“To give the defense structure a lot more capacity to manage or to find those numbers than I believe they do have in the sort of we’re just gonna cut everything a little bit approach,” Blunt said.
Blunt says this approach lets the Defense Department choose where to cut and where to not, and he hopes that this will be a better solution for everyone.
Another issue Blunt feels needs to be addressed: immigration reform. The Republican Senator says the Obama Administration plan looks like the latest entry in a long list of failures.
According to the Senator, no proposal is close to being a legislative product. They have their principles laid out, but it seems doubtful that they’ll become anything.
He states that there are three questions to any immigration issues: How do you secure the border, what are the work force needs of the country, and what do you do with those illegals already here?
“The key to all three of those questions is in the first one,” Blunt said. “If you can secure the border, the other two things are much easier to deal with than in an environment where people have every reason to believe that the problem is not yet under the level of control that they’d want it to be so that you could then realistically look at the other two questions.”
Senator Blunt feels that before any reform is possible, these issues must be addressed. Only then will things fall into place and progress be made.
