President Barack Obama said Tuesday that he has “no tolerance” for sexual assault in the military, comments made in the wake of a new Pentagon report showing the instances of such crimes have spiked since 2010. 

The president said he had spoken today with Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel to urge him to “exponentially step up” efforts to identify suspects in assaults, and aggressively prosecute those cases. 

“The bottom line is: I have no tolerance for this,” Obama said at a press conference following his meeting with South Korean President Park Geun-hye. 

‘I expect consequences,” Obama added. “So I don’t just want more speeches or awareness programs or training, but ultimately folks look the other way. If we find out somebody’s engaging in this, they’ve got to be held accountable – prosecuted, stripped of their positions, court martialed, fired, dishonorably discharged. Period.”

Related: Military sees sharp increase in sex assault cases

The Pentagon released startling new statistics on Tuesday showing that sexual assaults in the military rose by 35 percent since 2010. The troubling report was compounded by news that an Air Force officer in charge of the branch’s sexual assault prevention program was arrested and charged with sexual assault this past weekend. 

“For those who are in uniform who’ve experience sexual assault, I want them to hear directly from their commander in chief that I’ve got their backs,” the president said. “I will support them. And we’re not going to tolerate this stuff, and there will be accountability.”

The new report has already prompted new questions from lawmakers on Capitol Hill, who have pointedly asked military leaders how such a situation was allowed to escalate. 

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

President Barack Obama faces a news conference in the East Room of the White House, May 7, 2013.

The underlying purpose, though, of today’s visit by Park was to reaffirm an alliance between the U.S. and South Korea in the wake of increased saber-rattling by the North Korean regime and its nuclear program. North Korea removed two ballistic missiles from launch pads and downgraded their military’s readiness status following weeks of public warnings about its ability to respond to threats by the U.S. or South Korea. 

Obama warned that such provocative action would lead to a “dead end” for the North Korean regime. But he told the nation’s young leader, Kim Jong-Un, that it was not yet too late to reverse course. 

“President Park and myself very much share the view that we are going to maintain a strong deterrent capability – that we’re not going to reward provocative behavior,” Obama said. “But we remain open to the prospect of North Korea taking a peaceful path of de-nuclearization, abiding by international commitments, rejoining the international community and seeing a gradual progression in which both security and prosperity for the people of North Korea can be achieved.”

This story was originally published on Tue May 7, 2013 6:15 PM EDT

In his first major policy speech, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel said Wednesday that the spending reductions, or sequester, required by the 2011 Budget Control Act are forcing him and his subordinates to make the wrong types of cuts even as they’re trying to design a more efficient national security structure.

The sequester cuts are “having a disruptive and potentially damaging impact on the readiness of the force,” he said,  adding, “These quick and dramatic cuts would almost certainly require reductions in what have long been considered core military capabilities.”

Gary Cameron / Reuters

Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel gives a speech on fiscal defense spending at Ft. McNair in Washington April 3, 2013.

The funds available this fiscal year for defense – other than spending on military personnel – are being cut by about 8 percent. The Budget Control Act allows the president to exempt military pay from the spending cuts and President Barack Obama has done so.

The bigger challenge, Hagel said, is for Pentagon planners to make long-term structural changes and to confront three principal drivers of cost growth: overhead, personnel costs and the acquisition of new weapons systems.

Hagel approvingly quoted former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Roughead, who has warned that due to rising health care and retirement costs for both uniformed military personnel and civilian Defense Department employees, the Pentagon could be transformed from "an agency protecting the nation to an agency administering benefit programs.”

Hagel added, “We’re not going to be able to sustain the current personnel costs and retirement benefits—there will be no money in the budget for anything else.”

As of the end of 2012, the Defense Department had more than 760,000 civilian employees. Nearly 1.4 million people are serving in uniform.

Hagel implied that there are too many admirals and generals. He said, “The operational forces of the military -- measured in battalions, ships, and aircraft wings -- have shrunk dramatically since the Cold War era. Yet the three- and four-star command and support structures sitting atop these smaller fighting forces have stayed intact, with minor exceptions, and in some cases they are actually increasing in size and rank.”

Hagel delivered his speech at the National Defense University at Fort McNair in Washington.

During the question-and-and-answer period that followed his speech, a Defense Department civilian employee complained about the impending furloughs of up to 14 days which Hagel defended as necessary under the circumstances.

“Morale will be affected, but tough decisions are going to have to be made,” he said.

Another civilian Defense Department employee told Hagel he “very much appreciated the gesture” that Hagel made by announcing he’ll take a pay cut to show his solidarity with those being furloughed.

As to weapons purchases, Hagel said that “the military's modernization strategy still depends on systems that are vastly more expensive and technologically risky than what was promised or budgeted for.” Weapons development programs “continue to take longer, cost more, and deliver less than initially planned and promised.”

Recently the Government Accountability Office kept the Pentagon on its annual High Risk List of departments whose books are so mysterious and opaque that it’s at high risk of fraud, waste and mismanagement. The GAO said that the Defense Department “is one of the few federal entities that cannot accurately account for its spending or assets.”

When President George W. Bush made the decision to invade Iraq, there was no way to know the lasting ramifications of his choice. But a decade later, it's clear that the conflict not only transformed his own political party, but all of American politics.

Republicans found their edge on national security matters eroded, laying the groundwork for President Barack Obama’s ascension to the White House. The Iraq War, which was waged for nearly nine years, changed Washington by empowering the Democrats to take on the role of the party of counter-terrorism and defense.

On the night of March 17, 2003, in a nationally televised speech, Bush said he was giving Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and his sons 48 hours to leave their country or else face an American invasion.

Saddam had “harbored terrorists, including operatives of al Qaeda,” Bush said. “The danger is clear: using chemical, biological or, one day, nuclear weapons, obtained with the help of Iraq, the terrorists could fulfill their stated ambitions and kill thousands or hundreds of thousands of innocent people in our country, or any other.”

To the Iraqi people, Bush pledged, “The day of your liberation is near.”

Two nights later Bush was back on the air at 10:16 p.m., telling the American people that the invasion had begun. But he warned that the campaign “on the harsh terrain” of Iraq “could be longer and more difficult than some predict. And helping Iraqis achieve a united, stable and free country will require our sustained commitment.”

Ten years later, Bush’s warning has a haunting resonance for Americans, perhaps especially for those in his own party.

Preemptive invasions and wars of national liberation have gone out of favor with Americans, including many members of Bush’s party. Some of the disenchantment is due to the cost of Iraq operations which, as of Jan. 2012, the Congressional Budget Office estimated to be $767 billion.

Edge over Democrats destroyed
A new generation of House Republicans, many of them elected after Bush left office in 2009, has voted for spending cuts – even in the face of warnings that they will hurt Pentagon operations. The post-Bush Republicans put debt reduction ahead of overseas engagement.

They’re wary of any “sustained commitment” of the kind that Bush called for in 2003. Some, led by Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, are fearful of the concentration of power in the presidency that the Iraq War and the war against al Qaeda have brought about.

In the 2004 campaign, Bush conflated the danger of Saddam Hussein with the danger of terrorist attacks on the United States. Exit poll data from the 2004 election showed that more than seven out of 10 voters were worried that there would be another major terrorist attack in the United States. Of that group, Bush won 53 percent, while Democratic opponent John Kerry won 46 percent.

Fifty-five percent of voters in 2004 considered the war in Iraq to be part of the war on terrorism, and of that group, four out five voted for Bush.

Bush had an 18-point advantage over Kerry on the question of whom voters trusted to deal with terrorism.

By 2006, the cost of the Iraq insurgency had destroyed whatever illusion of post-9/11 Republican electoral ascendancy there may have been. Conservative columnist Ramesh Ponnuru said last week at a debate at the American Enterprise Institute on the future of the Republican Party, “You could make the argument that the beginning of the end of Republican dominance in Washington was the Iraq War, at least a stage of the Iraq War, 2005-2006.”

The outcome of the 2006 midterm elections was a disaster for Bush’s party, as Republicans lost 30 seats in the House and six in the Senate, losing control of both chambers.

The exit polls from the 2008 and 2012 elections showed how thoroughly the Iraq War had destroyed the GOP edge over the Democrats on national security and foreign policy.

In 2008, more than three out of five voters disapproved of the Iraq War. Although 2008 Republican candidate Sen. John McCain was critical of Bush’s conduct of the war and especially of Bush’s defense secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, McCain was identified with the war and was the foremost proponent of the Iraq troop surge in 2006. His Democratic opponent, Barack Obama, won 76 percent of those who disapproved of the Iraq War.

In the 2012 exit poll, of the relatively small group of the voters – only 5 percent – who chose foreign policy as the most important issue facing the country, 56 percent voted for Obama and only 33 percent for Republican Mitt Romney.

When asked who they’d trust to handle an international crisis, 42 percent said Obama, 36 chose Romney and 13 percent said both.

By losing the 2008 and 2012 elections, Republicans in effect handed responsibility for national security to a Democratic president for eight years, giving Obama the chance to show that a Democratic commander-in-chief can be just as or even more assertive than Bush was in using drones to kill suspected terrorists. Having Obama in charge means that it’s now a Democratic president who invokes the White House's inherent constitutional authority to wage war, with minimal consultation from Congress. Whether Democratic presidential contenders in 2016 will continue this robust assertion of presidential war-making power is unclear.

Ron Edmonds / AP file photo

President Bush holds a press conference in the Rose Garden with members of his Cabinet. From left to right, Acting Director of the Central Intelligence Agency John E. McLaughlin, Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, Secretary of State Colin Powell, Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, Attorney General John Ashcroft, and FBI Director Robert Mueller Monday, Aug. 2, 2004, in Washington.

'War weariness'
In the wake of the GOP defeats in 2008 and 2012, the party is defined at least partly by Rand Paul, whose father Ron was one of only six Republican House members to vote against the Oct. 10, 2002 authorization to use military force against Iraq.

Former Bush administration official Peter Wehner, who described himself as part of the internationalist wing of the Republican Party, said at the AEI debate last week that there is a concern in his wing of the GOP about “a kind of war weariness because of Iraq and Afghanistan … and I think Rand Paul tapped into it in a very creative and politically intelligent manner” with his filibuster against the possibility of Obama using drones to kill American citizens who may be terror suspects in the United States.

Paul also rails against U.S. aid to Egypt, where anti-American protests have taken place.

Wehner said he disagrees with Paul’s foreign policy views, but predicted a spirited intra-party debate over U.S. role in the world. “It may up being an acrimonious one because I think there are a lot people – including sort of traditional conservatives and a lot of people on talk radio – who had been strong supporters of President Bush and the Iraq war and the effort in Afghanistan – who spoke quite favorably about Rand Paul. I think that symbolized a kind of shift in thinking.”

Joining that debate the morning after Paul’s filibuster was McCain. Paul’s speculation about Obama using drones in the United States had “done a disservice to a lot of Americans by making them believe that somehow they are in danger from their government,” McCain said. “They are not. But we are in danger from a dedicated, longstanding, easily replaceable leadership enemy that is hell-bent on our destruction….”

Last week at the Conservative Political Action Conference, potential 2016 Republican presidential contender Sen. Marco Rubio of Florida warned that Americans “need to engage in the world…. We can't be involved in every armed conflict. But we also can't be retreating from the world….”

A divided party might have a hard time winning the next election. But divided as Republicans are now, so Democrats were at the height of the Bush era, and yet they won the 2008 election.

The weekend before American troops invaded Iraq, Kerry, then a contender for the 2004 Democratic nomination, faced a heckling reception from some of the activists at the California Democratic Party’s convention in Sacramento as he tried to minimize the importance of his vote for the resolution authorizing Bush to attack Iraq.

“It’s disappointing to me that he gave President Bush preemptive war power without really having it be an issue,” said one of the Democrats heckling Kerry, Tim Steed, who was then 22 and chairman of the Orange County Young Democrats, who supported Kerry’s rival Howard Dean. Iraq “is a very divisive issue for our party and that is a shame,” Steed said.

This story was originally published on Tue Mar 19, 2013 3:43 AM EDT

Republicans have lashed out against the Obama administration’s decision to bring a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden to New York City for trial, a high-profile move that would help the president follow through on one of his earliest campaign pledges.

One of the unmet promises from President Barack Obama’s first term involved closing the terrorist detention facility at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and bringing suspects to the continental United States for trial.

Related: Bin Laden’s son-in-law pleads not guilty to terror charge in New York

Two days after his first inauguration, the president signed an executive order calling for the closure of the military prison. But bipartisan resistance from lawmakers, who feared trials for terror suspects on domestic soil, scuttled efforts to shutter Guantanamo, leaving prisoners and detainees in legal limbo.

Four years later, Guantanamo remains in operation, and military tribunals – 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed’s trial is ongoing – continue at the naval base in Cuba. But the Obama administration’s decision to arraign a son-in-law of Osama bin Laden, Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, in federal court on Friday in New York marked maybe its most high-profile example of working to shift terror prosecutions to civilian courts.

And already, Republicans are mounting stiff resistance to the move.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who on Thursday took to the Senate floor to defend Obama’s prerogatives in waging drone strikes, vowed to fight the administration’s decision to bring Abu Ghaith to New York.

"The American people and their representatives in Congress have been clear that they do not want foreign members of al Qaeda brought to the United States,” he said in a statement. “The Obama administration's decision to try Abu Ghaith in a New York district court clearly contravenes the will of the American people. This decision by the Obama administration will not go unchallenged."

The issue of Guantanamo is one on which Republicans have built a rare political advantage over Obama on an issue of foreign policy. Their dogged opposition to terror trials on U.S. soil has won over a handful of Democrats, thereby stymying the administration’s ability to execute one of the president’s first official orders.

And following Abu Ghaith’s “not guilty” plea this morning to charges of plotting to kill Americans, Republicans have piled on in short order.

“What has not changed since the issuance of the president's executive orders is that terrorists working to attack the United States are enemy combatants, and if captured should be placed in military custody where they can be interrogated,” Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said in a statement. “The decision of the president to import Sulaiman Abu Ghaith into the United States solely for civilian prosecution makes little sense, and reveals, yet again, a stubborn refusal to avoid holding additional terrorists at the secure facility at Guantanamo Bay despite the circumstances.”

Added Republican Rep. Peter King, the New York congressman who’s been vocally critical of terror trials in New York: "While a federal court trial of Abu Ghaith in lower Manhattan would not present the same security issues as a trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, I strongly believe as a matter of policy that military tribunals are the proper venue for enemy combatants. If the Abu Ghaith trial does go forward in federal court it must not be used as a precedent for future enemy combatants who should be tried at Guantanamo."

With Congress out of town, few Democrats have chimed in on the Abu Ghaith decision; he was only extradited on Thursday. Several Democrats, like Manhattan Rep. Jerrold Nadler, D-N.Y., have in the past been vocally supportive of civilian trials in New York.

"I support the government bringing this prosecution in civilian court and expect that the federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York will successfully prosecute Abu Ghaith and put him away for the rest of his life," Sen. Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic chairwoman of the Senate intelligence panel, said in a statement. She has previously supported trials for terror suspects in the United States. "The bottom line is the federal criminal court system works. Hundreds of international terrorists have been convicted in our federal courts since 9/11 and are locked away in heavily fortified federal prisons."

J. Scott Applewhite / AP

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz. speaks with reporters on Capitol Hill in Washington, Thursday, March 7, 2013, as he leaves a GOP policy meeting.

Deputy White House press secretary Josh Earnest, though, used Friday’s briefing with reporters to push back against criticism of the move.

“The intelligence community agrees that the best way to protect our national security interests is to prosecute Abu Ghaith in an Article III court,” Earnest said, later adding: “This is somebody who's going to be held accountable for his crimes and will be done -- and that will be done in accordance with the laws and values of this country, and it will be done so in a pretty efficient way.”

This story was originally published on Fri Mar 8, 2013 4:11 PM EST

Highlighting the discord among Republicans over President Barack Obama’s targeted killings policy, two prominent GOP senators, John McCain of Arizona and Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, took to the Senate floor to criticize Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul’s 12-hour filibuster Wednesday. 

Gary Cameron / Reuters

Senators John McCain, R-Ariz., (L) and Lindsey Graham, R-S.C. confer at the Senate Armed Services Committee in Washington March 5, 2013.

Thirteen Republican senators – including Senate GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and the junior GOP senators from McCain’s and Graham’s home states -- joined Paul during his filibuster to show their support for his demand that President Barack Obama explicitly say whether he thinks he has the authority to order the killing of a U.S. citizen on U.S. soil who was a noncombatant and posed no imminent threat of an attack.

Paul has delayed the confirmation of Obama’s CIA nominee John Brennan in order to dramatize his demand for an answer from Obama.

On Thursday Paul received a letter from Attorney General Eric Holder saying that the president does not have the authority "to use a weaponized drone to kill an American not engaged in combat on American soil."

McCain said Thursday the Senate needed to conduct hearings and an in-depth debate on Obama’s targeted killings policy, “but that conversation should not be talking about drones killing Jane Fonda and people in cafes. It should be all about what authority and what checks and balances should exist” in order to combat “an enemy that we know will be with us for a long time.”

In his filibuster Paul had approvingly quoted an article by National Review writer Kevin Williamson which said, “As satisfying as putting Jane Fonda on a kill list might have been, I don’t think our understanding of the law would have approved such a thing even though she did give communist aid to the aggressor in Vietnam (in the 1970s).”

While Paul was conducting his filibuster, McCain and Graham were among a group of Republican senators having dinner with Obama at a Washington, D.C. hotel.

Graham scoffed at Paul’s question about whether Obama thinks he has the authority to kill a noncombatant American citizen on U.S. soil.

“I find the question offensive,” Graham said Thursday on the Senate floor. “As much I disagree with President Obama and as much as I support past presidents, I do not believe that question deserves an answer.” Paul’s question, the South Carolina Republican said, “cheapens the debate.”

Graham said flatly that Obama would not use a drone against a noncombatant sitting in a café somewhere in the United States.

Recommended: Senate panel advances bill beefing up gun trafficking laws

But there was less of a policy split that might have appeared on the surface: Paul repeatedly said during his filibuster that the government can and should use lethal force in cases when an attack is imminent.

He cited the scenario of a terrorist who was about to attack the U.S. Capitol with a bazooka or rocket launcher, as well as similar scenarios.

But Paul said the Obama administration has not yet made clear “what rules are going to be used in America. If you’re going to kill noncombatants, people eating dinner in America, there have to be some rules. Does the Constitution apply?”

When Holder testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee Wednesday he repeatedly said the use of a drone to kill an American citizen on U.S. soil who wasn’t an imminent threat wouldn’t be an “appropriate” use of lethal force.

After repeated questioning from Sen. Ted Cruz, R- Texas, Holder finally said it would also not be constitutional. Holder said, “I thought I was saying ‘no.’ All right, no.”

In his comments on the Senate floor Thursday, Graham reprised the points he made Wednesday during the Holder hearing.

But the Paul filibuster and the excitement it generated among libertarians and Republicans has given new visibility to the discord over the targeted killings strategy and whether Obama might seek to apply it to U.S. citizen who posed an imminent threat.

Graham said to Holder, “I want to stand by you and the president to make sure we don’t criminalize the war and that the commander-in-chief continues to have the authority to protect us all.” He said “a lot of my colleagues are well-meaning but there is only one commander-in-chief in our Constitution.”

This story was originally published on Thu Mar 7, 2013 12:54 PM EST

In the raucous debate over the cuts in federal spending, also known as the sequester, which began taking effect Friday, a lot of numbers are being tossed around -- $85 billion, $42 billion, $1.2 trillion. And lots of adjectives, too -- “massive,” “deep,” “severe,” “arbitrary” and more.

You’d think that numbers would be more precise than adjectives, but there’s no agreement on the correct number to describe the size of the spending cuts required by the 2011 Budget Control Act.

The Congressional Budget Office explained last week that while the often-used figure of $85 billion “represents the reduction in budgetary resources available to government agencies this year” – the cash that would be on hand for agencies to spend -- in fact “not all of that money would have been spent in this fiscal year.”

Why is that?

Federal departments and agencies would have used some of that $85 billion to “enter into contracts to buy goods or services to be provided and paid for next year or in subsequent years,” the CBO said.

For instance, if the Navy is buying some submarines or if the Missile Defense Agency is buying new satellites, it may take them a few years to spend the money to do so.

Thus, since not all of the $85 billion would have been spent anyway in the current fiscal year, the CBO said that in fact $42 billion will be the actual size of the cut in outlays in the fiscal year which ends on Sept. 30.

And how large is $42 billion when compared to the total amount of federal outlays?

The federal government’s outlays this fiscal year will total $3.55 trillion, according to the CBO’s latest estimate. Do the arithmetic and you’ll see that $42 billion is 1.16 percent of what the federal government would have spent this year if there had there been no sequester.

A 1.16 percent cut does not seem “massive.”

But the cuts do not apply equally across the board to every single category of federal spending – even though the term “across the board” is often used to describe the cuts.

In reality, the Budget Control Act was designed to shield much federal spending from the spending cuts.

Pablo Martinez Monsivais / AP

The White House is seen through a chain-link fence where the inaugural reviewing stand once stood, Monday, March 4, 2013, in Washington, as the tear down on Pennsylvania Avenue from the inaugural neared completion.

What’s exempt is most mandatory spending -- the spending that goes to Medicare and Social Security for the old and the disabled, Medicaid and SNAP payments (“food stamps”) for the poor,  payments to low-income people in the form of tax credits, interest payments on the debt, federal employee retirement benefits, and other categories.

(The sequester does cut Medicare’s payments to hospitals, physicians, and the administrators of certain Medicare services by two percent.)

Since mandatory spending, which accounts for two-thirds of all federal spending, is mostly off limits, the spending cuts are highly concentrated on the remaining third of the budget, what’s called “discretionary spending” – the kind of spending that Congress would normally decide each year in its appropriations bills, sometimes increasing the amount spent on some items and perhaps lowering the amounts spent on others.

An example of discretionary spending: the money that goes to the National Science Foundation, which has an annual budget of about $7 billion and funds research in everything from the stickiness of spider webs to the demise of coral reefs in the Florida Keys.

In percentage terms, the CBO said, the amount available to spend for defense (other than for military personnel) will be cut by about 8 percent and the amount available for nondefense discretionary items will be cut by about 6 percent.

The Obama administration’s Office of Management and Budget has a higher estimate: a reduction in available money of 13 percent for defense programs and 9 percent for nondefense programs for the remaining seven months of this fiscal year.

Defense spending accounted last year for about 18 percent of all federal spending. Under the sequester, defense spending will bear a disproportionately large share of the cuts. And since the law gave President Obama the discretion to exempt military service members’ pay from the cuts (and he did so) the defense cuts will fall heavily on daily operations and maintenance, activities such as training missions for Navy aviators.

Finally, what about that other number that Obama used in his State of the Union address: “about a trillion dollars’ worth of budget cuts”?

Obama was referring to the full 10-year budget forecasting period and assuming that the Budget Control Act will remain in effect for the entire period.

If the automatic spending cut provisions were to remain in effect, they would reduce deficits by at least $1.2 trillion over the 10-year period from 2012 to 2021, the CBO has estimated. Total federal outlays over the next ten years will amount to $45 trillion.

This story was originally published on Mon Mar 4, 2013 10:37 AM EST

The debate over potential new gun laws turned raw and tearful on Wednesday as a key Senate committee held hearings on an assault weapons ban backed by President Barack Obama. 

"Jesse was the love of my life," said Neil Heslin, who broke down and cried as he told lawmakers about his son, Jesse Lewis, who was 6 years old when he was killed at Sandy Hook along with 19 other children.  

Standing on an easel were two photos of Jesse, one as a young boy and the other as a toddler, cradled in his dad's arms. His father struggled to read his testimony, his voice cracking and sometimes fading to a near whisper as he told the committee that Dec. 14, 2012, was the saddest day of his life.  

The emotional scene unfolded as the Senate Judiciary Committee met to discuss the potential assault weapons ban, part of a package of new gun laws that Obama is pushing for in the wake of the Newtown, Conn., shootings.  

"Those weapons were used in a battlefield in Vietnam. They were used in the Persian Gulf, they were used in Afghanistan, in Iraq. The sole purpose is to put a lot of lead on a battlefield quickly," Heslin said of guns like the one Adam Lanza used in the Newtown elementary school massacre.

Tempers had already flared earlier in the hearing, as Republican Sen. Lindsey Graham clashed with Edward Flynn, the Milwaukee police chief. Graham was focused on limited prosecution of background check violations -- a reality that Republicans have highlighted as evidence that it would be more effective to enforce laws already on the books than to write new ones.

"We don't chase paper, we chase armed criminals," Flynn snapped back.

As senators discussed the ban, Vice President Joe Biden at the White House urged action on guns.

"The public mood has changed. The excuse that it’s too politically risky to act is no longer acceptable. We cannot remain silent," Biden said.

In the audience at the hearing was a group of supporters and friends from Newtown who offered Heslin quiet encouragement -- many crying along with him as he testified.

Before the hearing, they spent Tuesday on Capitol Hill lobbying members of Congress, meeting with Sen. Joe Manchin, W-Va., and staffers with Sen. Kay Hagan, D-N.C. They spent over an hour with Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., and also met with House Majority Leader Eric Cantor.

They learned firsthand just how politically difficult an assault weapons ban would be.

"We appreciate what you do, more and more, seeing those meetings," Newtown resident Shelley Northrop told Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Conn., who with fellow Connecticut Sen. Richard Blumenthal stopped to talk quietly with the group from Newtown before the hearing began. Northrop was explaining to Murphy just how difficult it all seemed to get anything done.

"It's all tactical. Here, it's all tactical," Murphy told her. 

He was being more diplomatic than Republican Sen. John McCain was last week, when he told the mother of a victim of the shooting in an Aurora, Colo., movie theater: “I can tell you right now you need some straight talk. That assault weapons ban will not pass the Congress of the United States," McCain said.

Alex Wong / Getty Images

U.S. Attorney of the District of Colorado John Walsh waits for the beginning of a hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee February 27, 2013 on Capitol Hill in Washington, D.C.

The Senate Judiciary Committee does plan to take up the assault weapons ban, possibly as soon as Thursday. Reid, the majority leader, has pledged to allow a vote on the floor on the measure, and even pro-gun rights Republicans are publicly supportive of doing so.

"I couldn't agree more, I think we should take legislation like this up and get on record and make our respective cases," Graham said at the hearing.

The vote is a key part of the political calculus on gun laws, because it could help give some members cover to vote for the legislation that Democrats privately say could actually pass: universal background checks and new gun trafficking statutes.

But in recent days, the ongoing negotiations on a background check bill have slowed, with Democrats and Republicans at odds over how to keep track of private gun purchases.

Democrats want to require private gun sellers to keep records of who they've sold guns to so they can be traced if they're used in a crime. Republican Sen. Tom Coburn, who's been negotiating, is opposed to that requirement because he says it could lead to a database of all gun owners.

That's prompted Democrats, led by Manchin, to reach out to other moderate Republicans who might be willing to sign on, including McCain and Sen. Susan Collins of Maine.

Both Collins and McCain met with New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on Wednesday to discuss gun control, and McCain said Tuesday that he has been involved in the negotiations.

"I've been talking to Sen. Manchin and others," McCain said Tuesday, though he emphasized that he has "only been peripherally involved."

Already involved in those talks is Illinois Republican Sen. Mark Kirk, who also met with Bloomberg on Wednesday. Bloomberg has already spent millions from his personal fortune to defeat pro-gun candidates in his bid to expand gun control; the billionaire also met with Reid on Capitol Hill.

NBC's Carrie Dann contributed to this report.

Related:

Let us study gun violence, physicians beg Congress

This story was originally published on Wed Feb 27, 2013 9:30 AM EST

The Senate voted to confirm former Sen. Chuck Hagel as President Barack Obama's next secretary of defense following weeks of dogged opposition by Republican senators to their erstwhile colleague.

The Senate voted 58 to 41 to formally confirm Hagel, on the heels of a procedural vote earlier in the day that cleared the way for Tuesday afternoon's final vote.

That earlier vote dispensed with a filibuster that Senate Republicans had waged for a week and a half against Hagel, whose confirmation was delayed by Republicans past the President's Day recess in order to allow for more time to dig into the former Nebraska senator's background.

A number of Republican detractors — including Sens. John McCain, Ariz., Lindsey Graham, S.C. and Kelly Ayotte, N.H. — reversed their votes on Monday in order to allow the Hagel nomination to move forward.

The Senate voted 71 to 27 to move forward with Hagel's nomination, clearing the 60-vote threshold needed to end the GOP filibuster. A handful of the Republicans who allowed Hagel's nomination to come to a final vote ultimately voted against confirmation.

In the end, Obama was able to win confirmation for Hagel, his choice to succeed outgoing Secretary Leon Panetta at the Pentagon. But not before Republicans were able to drag out the confirmation fight and, in the process, ding Hagel, their onetime GOP Senate colleague from the Cornhusker State.

Republicans had fought strenuously to defeat Hagel, accusing him at points of harboring hostilities toward Israel, and sympathies for the Palestinian militant group Hamas.

Tied into Hagel's nomination as well have been Republicans' long-running effort to ding Obama and his administration over their handling of the Sept. 11, 2012 attacks on a U.S. consulate in Benghazi, Libya. 

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Former Senator Chuck Hagel testifies during a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on his nomination to be Defense Secretary, on Capitol Hill in Washington, in this January 31, 2013, file photo.

"What has their filibuster gained my Republican colleagues?" Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., asked on the Senate floor. "Twelve days later, Senator Hagel's exemplary record of service to his country remains untarnished."

Reid added: "Senate Republicans have delayed for the better part of two weeks for one reason and one reason only: partisanship."

Hagel didn't necessarily help his cause during a combative confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Republicans aggressively questioned Hagel on a variety of matters during the Jan. 31 hearing. 

Even still, Democrats held firm in their backing for the former Nebraska senator, helping to move his nomination forward. Republicans, though, managed to buy themselves more time — they said, to more fully investigate Hagel's background — by waging a filibuster against the nomination on Feb. 14. 

Democrats angrily protested the delay, especially as current Defense Secretary Leon Panetta planned to leave the job, as dangerous and unprecedented. Republican opponents of Hagel, though, said at that time that they would drop their objections to holding a confirmation vote after last week's recess.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 12:37 PM EST

While Chuck Hagel’s quest to become defense secretary was a long and painful ordeal, he’ll be facing a different kind of pain once he’s confirmed - likely on Tuesday - and replaces Leon Panetta at the Pentagon.

In addition to the spending cuts required by the Budget Control Act, which will trim the Defense Department’s budget resources by 8 percent in the current fiscal year, Hagel faces a nightmarish budget challenge.

He will be running a department with nearly 1.4 million people serving in uniform and nearly 800,000 civilian employees.

Hagel’s department is bigger than several major U.S. corporations, but its finances remain deeply troubled, obscure and impenetrable – even to budget experts and even after more than 20 years of warnings from the federal government’s accounting watchdog, the Government Accountability Office.

Just two weeks ago, the GAO kept the Pentagon on its annual "High Risk List" of departments whose books are so mysterious and opaque that they're at high risk of fraud, waste and mismanagement.

Related: After seven-week struggle, Hagel poised for defense confirmation

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images

Former Senator Chuck Hagel testifies before the Senate Armed Services Committee during his confirmation hearing to become the next secretary of defense on Capitol Hill January 31, 2013 in Washington, DC.

The GAO said that the Defense Department “is one of the few federal entities that cannot accurately account for its spending or assets.” The report added, “Without accurate, timely, and useful financial information, DOD is severely hampered in making sound decisions affecting its operations.”

As one specific example, the accounting watchdog cited the department’s supply-chain management which as of late 2011 had amassed $9.2 billion worth of excess inventory on hand and had already ordered $523 million worth of inventory which was purchased but likely unnecessary.

And the GAO noted that it had first put the Pentagon’s supply-chain management problem on its "High Risk List" in 1990.

Outside observers agree that the Pentagon’s finances are troubled and that it costs taxpayers too much money to get each aircraft carrier, missile, drone and other weapons system.

Retired Army Gen. David Barno, the former U.S. commander in Afghanistan and now a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, told a Council on Foreign Relations panel discussion earlier this month, “We're delivering capability in the military sense for more and more overhead cost year after year after year” due to an “egregiously inefficient Defense Department that's leaking money.”

He said the Pentagon’s method of operating is comparable to driving a 1985 Oldsmobile which is leaking oil, “and every time we go out on the highway at 65 miles an hour, we come back after another day, there's more and more oil on the floor of our garage in the morning. And our solution has been to buy more oil, to put it in the engine and go drive it at 65 miles an hour.”

And Hagel himself said in August of 2011 that the Defense Department “in many ways, has been bloated. Let's look at the reality here. The Defense Department's gotten everything it wanted the last 10 years and more.”

Despite the warnings from GAO and others, the Defense Department’s financial morass wasn’t a major focus of the questioning last month at Hagel’s confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Hagel did field some queries on the department’s finances from Sens. Claire McCaskill, D-Mo., Roy Blunt, R-Mo., and Angus King, I-Maine.

But apart from referring to the need for giving his subordinates in the Pentagon “flexibility” and “direction and expectations,” Hagel supplied little insight on what plans he might have in mind to make the Pentagon more accountable. And he more often asked questions than supplied answers.

Hagel did say that in both the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, Defense Department inspector generals had uncovered “billions and billions of dollars that are unaccounted for. Corruption, fraud, waste, abuse, it really is quite astounding.”

But he added, “When you think about the universe of money that went into both those wars, no one should be surprised.”

Then he asked “How do we fix it? What we do? How do we learn from this?”

He added more questions later in the hearing, “Why aren't we auditing these programs? Where's the accountability? That's certainly an area that we're going to have to take a look at.” And within days Hagel will have his chance to begin that accountability and to reduce the bloat he saw in his department.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 4:34 AM EST

Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

Former Senator Chuck Hagel.

Chuck Hagel’s seven-week struggle to win confirmation as secretary of defense appears near the end with an expected Senate vote Tuesday on his nomination.

President Barack Obama’s choice to run the Pentagon is expected to win confirmation since a few Republicans announced that they’ll join Senate Democrats in voting for him.

The vote would put an end to a rocky nomination process that came after Hagel’s GOP foes succeeded in delaying the confirmation.

Lead opponent, Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, insinuated two weeks ago that Hagel might have given as-yet undisclosed speeches to “extreme or radical groups” or received money from foreign sources or from defense contractors in 2008, 2009 and 2010.

But Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., rebuked the latter saying Hagel complied with the committee’s financial disclosure requirements and deserved confirmation.

Last week 15 GOP senators asked Obama to withdraw Hagel’s nomination, but it was clear that not enough Republican senators would vote to further delay Hagel’s confirmation by extended debate or filibuster.

The former Nebraska Republican senator turned against his party by campaigning for Democratic Senate candidate Bob Kerrey in Nebraska last year.

He’d also harshly criticized President George W. Bush after the Iraq war became unpopular in 2006, suggesting at one point that Bush might be impeached. These remarks made him popular with Democrats but something of a pariah in his own party.

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The antagonism of Cruz and several other Republican senators turned to disdain once Hagel testified before the Armed Services Committee last month. Hagel was forced to amend or retract comments he’d made about Iran, Israel and other matters.

At one point during his confirmation hearing, when discussing U.S. policy toward Iran’s efforts to build nuclear weapons, Hagel said, “I’ve just been handed a note that I misspoke and said I supported the president’s position on ‘containment.’ If I said that, I meant to say that obviously – his position on containment – we don’t have a position on containment.”

Levin intervened: “Just to make sure your correction is clear, we do have a position on containment – which is we do not favor containment.”

“It was the most unimpressive performance that I have seen in watching many nominees who came before the committee,” said Republican Arizona Sen. John McCain, a Hagel opponent.

Related: What problems will Hagel inherit at Department of Defense?

But Democrats on the panel repeatedly praised Hagel for having served in combat in Vietnam.

From the beginning, Obama portrayed Hagel as a man who was ideally qualified to head the Defense Department because, as the president said when announcing the nomination, he “knows that war is not an abstraction. He understands that sending young Americans to fight and bleed in the dirt and mud, that’s something we only do when it’s absolutely necessary.”

In presenting Hagel as his pick, Obama declared that “Chuck represents the bipartisan tradition that we need more of in Washington.”

Obama said that he was courageous and independent in his views “and that’s exactly the spirit I want on my national security team, a recognition that when it comes to the defense of our country, we are not Democrats or Republicans; we are Americans.”

But Republicans such as Cruz said Hagel was not up to the job of running the Pentagon. Cruz went so far as to argue that Hagel, if confirmed, would “make military conflict in the next four years substantially more likely” because his views on negotiating with Tehran would encourage the Iranians to accelerate their nuclear weapons development program.

This story was originally published on Tue Feb 26, 2013 4:10 AM EST

Even as one of their members, Richard Shelby of Alabama, now says he will vote in favor of not only cloture for Chuck Hagel to be defense secretary but for the Hagel nomination itself, 15 other Senate Republicans are calling for President Obama to withdraw his nomination.

"While we respect Senator Hagel's honorable military service, in the interest of national security, we respectfully request that you withdraw his nomination," the Republicans wrote to Obama and announced in a press release from Sen. John Cornyn's office. "It would be unprecedented for a Secretary of Defense to take office without the broad base of bipartisan support and confidence needed to serve effectively in this critical position. Senator Hagel's performance at his confirmation hearing was deeply concerning, leading to serious doubts about his basic competence to meet the substantial demands of the office. While Senator Hagel's erratic record and myriad conversions on key national security issues are troubling enough, his statements regarding Iran were disconcerting."

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Cornyn of Texas is up for reelection this cycle and has a Lone Star State freshman, Ted Cruz, rising as the new darling of the right. The signers of the letter include Cruz, James Inhofe (R-OK), Lindsey Graham (R-SC), Roger Wicker (R-MS), David Vitter (R-LA), Mike Lee (R-UT), Pat Toomey (R-PA), Marco Rubio (R-FL), Dan Coats (R-IN), Ron Johnson (R - WI), Jim Risch (R-ID), John Barrasso (R-WY), Tom Coburn (R-OK), and Tim Scott (R-SC).

Notably not signing on, however, were Sens. John McCain (R-AZ) and Kelly Ayotte (R-NH), two-thirds of the Graham-McCain-Ayotte grouping.

Read the full letter here. 

Shelby becomes the third Republican to voice public support for Hagel, giving him 58 public yes votes. The other two Republicans to come out in support of Hagel are Thad Cochran of Mississippi and Mike Johanns of Nebraska, who filled Hagel's seat in the Senate. (Johanns announced Monday that he would be retiring when his term ends in 2014.)

Chip Somodevilla / Getty Images file photo

Sen. Richard Shelby (R-AL)

"Sen. Shelby intends to support the Hagel nomination barring any unforeseen disqualifications that come to light before the vote," Hagel spokesman Jonathan Graffeo told NBC. "That is not a change of heart. He has always been inclined to support Hagel, but he voted against cloture as a courtesy to members who said they needed more time to examine Hagel's record."

Several Republicans have indicated they would likely support at least cloture after the Senate gets back from its break next week.

In his first major address since taking office three weeks ago, Secretary of State John Kerry told an audience at the University of Virginia Wednesday that Americans must invest more in foreign aid and diplomacy in order to protect U.S. security and to cultivate American prosperity.

“Deploying diplomats today is much cheaper than deploying troops tomorrow,” he told an audience of students and others. He noted that he was speaking at a university founded by the very first secretary of state, Thomas Jefferson, who also served as American ambassador to France.

“Foreign assistance is not a giveaway. It’s not charity.  It is an investment in a strong America and free world,” Kerry said.

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The former Massachusetts senator, who was the Democratic presidential nominee in 2004, noted that “our whole foreign policy budget is just over one percent of our national budget. Think about it a bit: over one percent, a little bit more,  funds all of our civilian and foreign affairs efforts -- every embassy, every program that saves a child form dirty drinking water or from AIDS, (or) that reaches out to build a village and bring America’s value.” 

Steve Helber / AP

Secretary of State John Kerry gestures as he delivers his first foreign policy speech, Wednesday, Feb. 20, in Old Cabel Hall at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Va.

Kerry said that not spending U.S. taxpayer dollars on foreign aid and diplomacy would leave a vacuum that would “quickly be filled by those whose interests differ dramatically from ours. We learned that lesson in the deserts of Mali recently, in the mountains of Afghanistan in 2001, and in the tribal areas of Pakistan even today.”

Kerry argued that foreign aid need not mean poorer nations being permanent dependents of the U.S. taxpayer. “Eleven of our top 15 trading partners used to be the beneficiaries of U.S. foreign assistance,” he said. “That's because our goal isn't to keep a nation dependent on us forever. It’s precisely to create these markets, to open these opportunities, to establish rule of law. Our goal is to use assistance and development to help nations realize their own potential … and become our economic partners.”

Kerry emphasized the role of the State Department and American embassies in drumming up business for U.S. corporations, citing, for example, the American embassy in Jakarta for helping secure “an order for commercial aircraft – the largest order Boeing has ever been asked to fill.  Meanwhile, the Indonesian state railroad is buying its locomotives from GE.”

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He also argued that the United States must join with other nations to reduce the threat of nuclear weapons and “build partnerships” so that “we don't have to fight these battles alone. This includes working with our partners around the world in making sure Iran never obtains a weapon that would endanger our allies and our interests.”

He did not mention in his speech the continuing civil war and refugee crisis in Syria. Kerry and President Barack Obama are under pressure from a bipartisan group of senators to do more, including establishing an no-fly zone over Syria, in order to protect rebels from the armed forces of President Bashar al-Assad.