With the country facing unsustainable long-term structural deficits in the coming years, more and more lawmakers have been willing to broach the once untouchable subject of cutting defense spending to save money. House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said a few weeks ago that “any conversation about the deficit that leaves out defense spending is seriously flawed before it begins.” Rep. Paul Ryan (R-WI) added that “there are billions of dollars of waste you can get out of the Pentagon, lots of procurement waste. We’re buying some weapons systems I would argue you don’t need anymore.”

Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA) tried to sing the right notes yesterday, saying with regard to defense spending that “there are savings everywhere. We should be looking, as a Congress, toward finding savings.” However, Isakson that bristled at the notion that a program the Pentagon has repeatedly said it doesn’t want should be cut:

One expenditure, the second engine for the F-35 program, did receive Isakson’s support. Secretary of Defense Robert Gates has recommended President Obama veto any defense spending bill that includes funding of the second engine. “The second engine makes sense from a standpoint of having a redundant system to protect the aircraft,” he said.

Gates has called the second engine “costly and unnecessary,” while U.S. Air Force Secretary Michael Donley has referred to it as “another rock” on top of the F-35 program.

Isakson is hardly alone in paying lip service to cutting defense spending while opposing actual cuts in weapons systems that no one wants. Rep. Mike Pence (R-IN) has said “if we are going to put our fiscal house in order, everything has to be on the table. We have to be willing to look at domestic spending, we have to be able to look at entitlements, and we have to look at defense.” But Pence also supports the second engine.

And then there is conservative darling Sarah Palin, who said in a speech last month that “no government agency should be immune from budget scrutiny,” but then proceeded to say that we absolutely must purchase all the weapons Gates says we don’t need. “[Gates] said we have to ask whether the nation can really afford a Navy that relies on $3 [billion] to $6 billion destroyers, $7 billion submarines and $11 billion carriers,” Palin said. “Well, my answer is pretty simple: Yes, we can and yes, we do.”

In the last 10 years, the defense budget has almost doubled to $549 billion, and in real terms baseline defense spending “is now higher than at the height of the Reagan buildup, and total defense spending now exceeds what we spent any time since World War II.” As Ryan has said, “you know the current Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, he’s going a pretty good job of identifying obsolete weapons systems that are costing tens of billions of dollars that aren’t needed.” Now if only he could get Congress to go along.

This week, the National Mediation Board (NMB) announced a rule change making union elections under the Railway Labor Act (RLA) more democratic. Previously, under the RLA, workers who did not cast votes in an election were counted as having voted against unionization. Now, though, they will simply not be counted at all, like non-voters in any election for political office.

This change has upset airlines governed by the RLA — particularly Delta Airlines, which is largely non-union — prompting them to launch a lawsuit in an attempt to block the rule change. And these corporations have some allies in Congress, who have launched a concurrent attempt to legislatively prevent the change.

The charge is being led by Sen. Johnny Isakson (R-GA), whose number one campaign contributor this election cycle is Atlanta-based Delta. He is circling a “resolution of disapproval,” which, if adopted by both the Senate and the House and signed by the President within 60 days of a rule being published, negates that rule’s effect. “I will use all available tools at my disposal…to see that this assault on employee rights does not stand,” Isakson said.

So far, Isakson has managed to drum up 27 co-sponsors for his resolution. It’s quite remarkable that these lawmakers are willing to sign their names to a document rendering disapproval of the democratic process. After all, they are explicitly endorsing the idea that uncast votes should be counted one way or the other.

Plus, as United Steelworkers International President Leo Gerard wrote, the process which the NMB overturned provided huge incentives for corporations to inflate their workforce numbers, in order to increase the number of votes necessary to approve the union:

Compounding that supermajority obstacle was the NMB practice of permitting employers to determine who was eligible to vote, then excusing them from providing that list to workers seeking collective bargaining. This created an incentive for employers to “accidently” include the names of workers who’d quit or retired — ineligible voters whose inability to cast ballots created automatic “no” votes. Writing about losing an election in 2008, Delta flight attendant Linda Sorenson said airline officials released its list after the balloting. Among other problems, it included the name of a deceased worker.

These sorts of shenanigans have no place in a fair election process, and the system which the Republicans are trying to preserve obviously incentivizes them. But Isakson is pressing on, undeterred. “We will have the signatures necessary to discharge my resolution of disapproval, to bring about a vote on the floor of the Senate,” Isakson said yesterday. Fortunately, the odds of President Obama signing such a resolution, even if Isakson found 51 votes in favor of it in the Senate, are, I think, effectively nil.