Four reasons Republicans are embracing the 'sequester'

Republicans, it is clear, are conflicted on the "sequester." How did they come to embrace it? Here are four reasons.

3. Hello, 2014

J. Scott Applewhite/AP
Forget the chummy moments with House Speaker John Boehner (l.) at Rep. Nick Rahall's mock swearing in ceremony in January. Now Republicans are using the sequester to try to make the Democrat ex-Congressman Rahall.

If you’re a Republican and would love to make some House Democrat an ex-lawmaker, the sequester makes a convenient sledgehammer.

Nick Rahall is showing West Virginia voters his true colors by refusing to offer up any reasonable solutions to President Obama’s sequester,” reads a typical release from the National Republican Campaign Committee, in this case hitting West Virginia’s long-standing Democratic House member.

Of course, House Democrats have offered their alternative – one that includes cuts and tax increases – several times in the committee that governs which amendments can make it to the House floor but saw their replacement blocked by Republicans each time.

But why should that stop Republicans – and Democrats, too, who have also used the sequester to tar vulnerable Republicans?

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Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

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If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

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