Will GOP Deficit Hawks Turn Against the War?

Republicans worried about the deficit find it difficult to cut entitlement spending. Will the Afghan war’s $740 billion a year price tag be an easier target?

David Leonhardt of the New York Times complains that Republican anti-deficit promises lack specificity.

The pledge imagines a world without tough choices, where we can have low taxes, big government and a balanced budget. And therein lies the path to ever larger deficits.

Yet there is one way that Republicans could advance at least a big step toward such a world, and that is by reducing military spending. Please note - I am not recommending this option! Just the opposite.

But if I were a freshman Republican House member, full of Tea Party fury but also carried into office by retiree votes, here's what I'd see:

I could get serious about balancing the budget without touching the 80% of government spending contained in Medicare, Social Security, defense, interest on the debt, etc. Painful!

I could forget about balancing the budget. Embarrassing.

I could begin to look at revenue measures, including energy taxes or consumption taxes. Unthinkable, fatal.

Or I could ask myself why I was voting $740 billion a year - very nearly as much as Medicare and Medicaid combined! - to fund the war-fighting policy of a president I despised and mistrusted.

So far, it does not get much expression - Michael Steele badly damaged himself by mentioning it aloud - but Republicans are not enthusiastic about the Afghanistan war. That unenthusiasm has not yet had much political effect, because aside from Bob Gates no Republican in the past 2 years has had to think very hard about reconciling the war's costs with other Republican priorities and commitments. After January, they likely will - and what is now being quietly felt may soon be less quietly spoken.