EASLEY – U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R) S.C., found few kind words for recent operations of the federal government today when he spoke to the Easley Rotary Club.

“Do things look screwed up in Washington from a distance?” he asked. “They look worse close up.”

South Carolina’s senior senator spoke on most of the main topics from immigration reform to the federal budget deficit to Sequestration.

It is that final topic that causes Graham concern for national security and the South Carolina economy. Sequestration is the measure drawn up as the punishment for federal budget writers to face if they failed to get a fiscal plan done in time.

Few believed it would actually come to pass, but an inability to come to agreement so far has left the radical cuts to a broad range of federal spending items within site.

Chief among those in the senator’s eyes is major cuts to the armed forces, giving the U.S. over time the smallest Navy since 1915 and the smallest Army since 1940.national security for a long time.”

Referring to meetings televised recently of the president meeting with first responders over concerns about Sequestration, Graham said the president “Doesn’t need to be campaigning. He needs to be at the White House talking about how to come to agreement.”

In regard to allowing the Sequestration cuts to go into affect, Graham said, “The president will make decisions over the next 60 to 90 days that will affect our

That is not the image to portray in a time when political events in the Middle East appear to be spiraling out of control. “We are facing a devastating unsustainable debt in the face of a radical Islam on the march. We need to show a sense of maturity that we haven’t seen in a long time, sit down at a table and iron things out,” he said.

More imminently closer to home is the effect the broad sweeping budget cuts would have to the South Carolina economy. It would force drastic cutbacks at Shaw and McIntyre Air Force bases. “I can not think of a more devastating thing to happen to the economy other than the closing of the Port of Charleston,” Graham said. Concerns over the port’s ability to receive large transoceanic traffic over the next decade hold grave concerns for commercial traffic routed through the port.

“I have never been more disappointed in the Republican Party,” Graham said. “The party of Ronald Reagan would never have allowed this to happen.”

He called for action now on immigration reform. “Now is the time,” he said. The process would start with a virtual security system expanded from the E-verify worker

“If we make it harder for people to work without verification they won’t come here,” Graham said.

That will help secure a new identification process that will allow a switch to inviting workers that best suit this nation’s economy instead of the current one based on the needs of the source country