President Obama has blamed sequestration for everything from cutting White House tours to the possibility of first responders being laid off. But on Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) did Obama one better: he blamed sequestration for the accidental deaths of seven US Marines on Tuesday in Nevada.
Taking to the floor of the Senate, Reid explained the situation in Nevada. He then continued:
Mr. President, it’s very important we continue training our military, so important. But one of the things in sequester is we cut back in training and maintenance. That’s the way sequester was written…. These men and women, our Marines were training there in Hawthorne. And with this sequester, it’s going to cut back. I just hope everyone understands the sacrifices made by our military.
It was Barack Hussein Obama’s idea to place the heaviest cuts in the sequester on the military. It was Harry Reid’s intransigence that refused to allow House bills that would have avoided cuts to the military to be brought to the floor of the Senate. And it was both Reid and Obama who stopped a Senate bill that would have allowed Obama to cut the sequestration amount largely at his discretion.
Ben Shapiro is Editor-At-Large of Breitbart News and author of the book “Bullies: How the Left’s Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silences America” (Threshold Editions, January 8, 2013).