Senate works to avoid defense bill drama after House brawl
David Sivak
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Senators aren’t bracing for the sort of drama that gripped the House as it passed its annual defense bill last week, but there could still be bumps in the road as the Senate attempts to pass its own version before the August recess.
Sending the National Defense Authorization Act to the president’s desk is normally a bipartisan affair — in the face of Washington gridlock, it’s one of the only bills to get through Congress reliably.
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This year will be no exception, but Republicans’ tight margins in the House this term are adding a level of partisanship not ordinarily seen with the bill.
The legislation, which sets defense priorities for the coming year, passed out of the House Armed Services Committee last month in a 58-1 vote. But a series of “culture war” amendments adopted on the House floor led Democrats to vote against it en masse.
Conservatives, who hold outsize sway due to Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) four-seat majority, successfully added provisions on abortion, diversity initiatives, and transgender care to the final bill.
So far, the Senate has avoided the floor fights. It held six amendment votes this week and adopted a bipartisan manager’s package of 51 measures plus several other amendments.
“We want both sides to have input, but neither side should derail the bill,” Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) said on Wednesday as the process got underway. “We should avoid the chaos we saw last week in the House that greatly hindered their NDAA process.”
Senate leaders are hopeful the bill will pass without fireworks, but with days of negotiations ahead, every member the Washington Examiner spoke to hedged their optimism.
“I hope we can, but it’s early in the process,” Senate Majority Whip Dick Durbin (D-IL) said. “We got another week to go.”
Senate conservatives don’t have the same kind of leverage as their House counterparts. Republicans are in the minority, and Schumer won’t allow a floor vote on something that will derail the bill.
Any “toxic” votes that are agreed to will fail, thanks in part to a 60-vote threshold required for nongermane amendments in the chamber.
“It’s what prevents the Senate from impulse,” said Sen. Kevin Cramer (R-ND), a member of the Armed Services Committee.
That doesn’t mean the process will go off without a hitch, however. The Senate operates by unanimous consent, meaning any single senator can slow down passage.
Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) has threatened to object to a time agreement unless the chamber votes on whether to appoint an inspector general for aid to Ukraine, though he told the Washington Examiner on Thursday he feels optimistic it will be brought to the floor.
It’s a familiar dance — leadership grants a parade of votes under threat of obstruction.
“That’s normal. That’s just a part of the process,” said Sen. Mike Rounds (R-SD), another Armed Services Committee member. “Everybody wants to get their amendments in.”
But the process requires Senate leaders to navigate a delicate balance on what makes it to the floor, choosing among the 800-plus amendments that have been filed.
“You sort of get into this circular firing squad mode where, ‘If I don’t get a vote on my amendment, then you’re not gonna get a vote on your amendment,’ and that’s how things like this end up falling apart,” Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX), formerly the Senate majority whip, told the Washington Examiner.
Some of the conservatives who usually demand votes have already gotten them, including Sens. Rand Paul (R-KY) and Mike Lee (R-UT). Others don’t appear ready to make trouble.
“None of them are going to pass,” Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI) said of the amendments he’s filed. “That’s part of the problem. It’s a big, old charade.”
The Senate has finished voting for the week and will resume Tuesday evening. But the bulk of the amendments will make it to the floor Wednesday and Thursday, the final days to pass the bill before lawmakers skip town for the month of August.
One Senate aide familiar with negotiations said the Senate is not yet on a “glide path” for the bill but expects everything will come together before the recess.
Cramer has a “more the merrier” attitude when it comes to amendment votes but expressed a common view among senators — that the legislative fights should be saved for the conference committee, where the House and Senate will negotiate a compromise NDAA. There, Republicans will have more leverage, he argued, given some of the social policies they support made it into the House bill.
“I’d be happy to have all those votes, even if we lost them. I think a lot of people would,” he said. “But we also need to pass an NDAA and get the two bills so we can reconcile them, at which point we can have the same discussion in a different context.”
Schumer has offered a vote on one of the flash points — the Pentagon abortion policy at the center of Sen. Tommy Tuberville’s (R-AL) hold on military nominations. But that offer has more to do with ending the blockade than the NDAA itself.
“We’re trying to break the impasse and do it in a reasonable way,” Durbin said. “If the vote is a mechanism that Tuberville is looking for, then he’s gonna get his vote, and we’ll see what happens.”
A repeal of the policy, which pays the travel expenses of servicewomen receiving an abortion, made it into the House-passed bill, meaning the issue will have to be dealt with in conference anyway, and Tuberville has yet to request a vote.
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Negotiating a compromise in conference will be thorny given the “poison pills” Republicans inserted. But Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), who chairs the Armed Services Subcommittee on Seapower, does not expect the process to be particularly contentious.
“It’s always a challenge. I mean, there’s always differences,” he said, “and I don’t think this year is going to be any more difficult than past years.”