Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., took to the Senate floor last week still stinging from political defeat.
The “cowardly” Democrats had just scuttled the “last, best chance in years” to finally free the defense budget from sequestration.
“What did the Democrats do? They threw it away. They took a perfectly good bipartisan opportunity to repeal these automatic spending cuts, and they threw it away,” he ranted.
For days, Cotton had been at the center of a roiling back-room debate in the Senate over his legislation to repeal the sequester, the 10-year mandatory across-the-board cuts in the Budget Control Act that have enforced caps on defense and other federal spending.
Republicans, backed by Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the Armed Services chairman, wanted a floor vote on adding Cotton’s amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act. Success on the floor could have allowed the amendment to ride the must-pass 2018 defense policy bill into law later this year.
In the end, negotiations with Democrats over debate and votes on NDAA amendments reached a stalemate, Cotton’s amendment died, and the NDAA passed on Sept. 18. The Senate had walked up to the edge of repealing the sequester, legislation long maligned by both parties, and turned away at the last moment.
“Every one of those Democrats who sit on the Armed Services Committee and have claimed to want to stop these automatic spending cuts can go home and tell the men and women in uniform in their states that they had a chance to vote on it and they were too cowardly to even put their name on the rolls,” said Cotton, who is a member of the committee.
He said Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, D-N.Y., and the Democrats used “cynical political calculus” to block the vote and preserve the sequester because it gives the party more leverage to negotiate on a budget deal later this year.
Since June, Democratic leaders have called on Republicans to come to the table on an overarching deal to lift Budget Control Act caps for their non-defense spending priorities, such as education, job training, and infrastructure programs. Democrats have historically said they will back defense spending if it’s matched dollar-for-dollar with nondefense items.
But Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., an Armed Services member, pushed back against Cotton’s allegation that there was a connection.
“I supported the amendment and was looking forward to voting for it, others in my caucus felt the same way,” he said.
Kaine told Cotton that Democrats had “a whole lot” of amendments and were also disappointed that no agreement could be brokered to allow those votes on the Senate floor before the chamber overwhelmingly passed the NDAA.
“So, you’re not getting a vote was not because of people necessarily wanting to avoid the issue [of sequestration], it was wanting to have a robust amendment process, and if everybody else’s amendments were going to get kicked out sadly yours did as well, and I regret that it was,” Kaine said.
The Republican and Democratic negotiations over the measure also included three other amendments. McCain had unsuccessfully offered to allow floor votes on the other proposals, including a popular Democratic amendment to preserve medical research in the Defense Department, in the hope of brokering a deal on the Cotton sequester legislation, a congressional aide close to the talks said.
But Democratic leadership rejected the offer due to strong opposition to the Cotton amendment, the aide said.
Still, Cotton’s amendment likely would have drawn some Democratic rank-and-file votes if it had made it to the Senate floor. Sen. Thom Tillis, R-N.C., also an Armed Services member, said a significant number were “sympathetic” despite the party’s decision to oppose the vote.
“For some reason they wanted to talk about this when we’re talking about funding at the end of the year,” Tillis said. “I don’t understand the strategy behind it, but it sounded like we had a fair number of people on the other side of the aisle that supported it.”
The amendment would have drawn at least 20 Democrats, according to one Republican aide.
Once in the NDAA, it would have gone to conference committee negotiations between McCain and Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I, the Senate Armed Services leaders and Reps. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, and Adam Smith, D-Wash., the House Armed Services leaders.
At least three of the leaders tasked with writing a final NDAA bill — McCain, Thornberry, and Smith — all support eliminating the sequester. That means if Cotton’s amendment had gotten its vote in the Senate, it likely would have been included in a final version of a policy bill that has been passed by Congress annually for more than 50 years.
“We were inches away from the goal line” of scrapping the sequester, the Republican aide said.
Now, sequestration remains an obstacle in the way of plans by McCain, Thornberry and President Trump to dramatically increase defense spending in the 2018 budget, which is expected to be finalized in December.
The Senate’s NDAA includes $640 billion in base defense priorities and the House bill written by Thornberry’s committee and passed in June includes nearly $632 billion. Trump is requesting a $603 billion base budget. A separate fund for overseas military operations, called Overseas Contingency Operations, is not subject to budget caps.
But federal law currently caps that base spending at $549 billion. If Congress breaks that cap, the sequester targeted by Cotton’s amendment will kick in and arbitrarily slash funding across the federal budget to remain inside set limits.
“We still have no path to appropriate the money we are about to authorize,” McCain said during the NDAA vote. “That requires a bipartisan agreement to adjust the spending caps in the Budget Control Act.”
Republicans and Democrats are faced with hammering out that new deal by the time the current stopgap defense budget expires Dec. 8.
Meanwhile, ending the sequester would have been a game-changer for the Pentagon, which has suffered a string of major mishaps that has injured or killed dozens of troops over the past few months.
Top leaders and military brass have warned in budget cycle after budget cycle that budget caps are degrading the military and increasing risks for service members.
Those warnings grew louder over the past week as Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson called budget instability a top threat to the service and Navy Secretary Richard V. Spencer said the effects of budget caps have been “stunning” for the fleet.
“If we don’t get budgetary predictability, if we don’t remove the defense caps, then we are questioning whether or not America has the ability to survive. It’s that simple,” Defense Secretary Jim Mattis said.
