Page 5 - The Sequester News Today : Breaking News, Live Updates & Top Stories | Vimarsana

All this inside politics. i'm fining it hard to follow here. didn't mitch mcconnell vote no on this budget and yet that helps him? >> yeah. i think it -- everyone expected him to vote no, and he did. it does help him because he is facing a primary challenger. he has to really -- the worst of all worlds, primary challenge and he has a general election challenge, where other republican senators, like ma mar alexander, that cochran, once they get by the primary they're going to win re-election. mcconnell has to worry about both. so he went no on this budget deal because it breaks the caps put int...

In motion. that was the theory. would it hold? >> do you actually see anything changing until we do hit some kind of government collapse? >> i hope not. >> january 31st, butts county, georgia. >> i believe in the constitution as our founding fathers meant it. >> reporter: that's congressman paul brown. president obama had republicans like him in mind when he proposed the sequester back in 2011. >> if we went back to the original intent of the constitution, we wouldn't have a debt ceiling problem. >> people need to remember what the sequester is -- how it came about. and that was over a fight o...

The american people that obamacare wasn't working, i think the political pressure on the president would have been considerable. now, would he have somehow needed some sort of face-saving retreat about, well, this is not repealing it, it's a delay till we get our act together? sure. but i think that could potentially have been achievable. if we had been united. >> reporter: in fact, a fox news poll taken at the time found a sizable minority of americans actually did want to defund the law and a majority liked the idea of delaying it. that's what the house tried next, passing a bill funding the...

On an unwilling washington. >> reporter: the deal was this -- if republicans and democrats could not cut $1.2 trillion out of the growth of spending over ten years, automatic cuts would kick in. half would come from domestic spending, half from defense. >> we're not doing it. >> reporter: that's why brown was torn over the sequester last winter. he desperately wants to downsize the government. except for the pentagon. >> we need to make targeted cuts, but we need to have a strong national defense. we need to spend more money on the military. the white house's calculation was that republicans w...

Bad idea. >> true. but they disagree on how to avoid them. republicans want entitlement reform. the president asks for higher taxes, and new spending programs. >> i'm announcing the launch of three more of these manufacturing hubs. use some of our oil and gas revenues to fund an energy security trust. put people to work as soon as possible on our most urgent repairs. make high quality preschool available to every single child in america. redesign america's high schools so they better equip graduates. >> higher taxes on job reducers. more spending will continue to destroy jobs. >> our cameras f...