Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid on Thursday called for Republicans to abide by last year’s budget deal ahead of a vote on adding $18 billion to the Pentagon’s war chest.
“The security of our great country depends on more than bombs and bullets,” Reid said in his opening floor speech.
The Senate will vote Thursday morning on an amendment from Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., that would add $18 billion to the overseas contingency operations account in the defense policy bill. The money would largely be spent on base defense priorities, like increasing the number of aircraft and ships to be purchased in fiscal 2017.
But Reid, D-Nev., said the Senate must stick to last year’s budget deal, which raised caps equally on defense and non-defense budgets, and “maintain parity between the Pentagon and the middle class.”
Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I., introduced a second-order amendment that would replace McCain’s language with a plan to boost both defense and non-defense by about $18 billion each. The domestic spending would focus on Zika research, infrastructure improvements, including a grant for the water crisis in Flint, and more investment in science and research.
It also funds other operations that Democrats say are critical to keeping the country safe, like the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and Transportation Security Administration.
Reid said that if the Senate passes McCain’s amendment, but not Reed’s, the appropriations process will grind to a halt. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said he was planning to begin consideration of the fiscal 2017 defense spending bill next week.
Following an opening statement by McConnell in which he was critical of President Obama’s foreign policy, Reid pointed to the failures of former President George W. Bush.
“For my friend to talk about failed foreign policy takes a tremendous amount of mental gymnastics,” Reid said.
The minority leader pointed to several issues that began under Bush’s watch, including the elimination of a budget surplus after paying for two wars with a “credit card,” the continued destabilization of the Middle East, including the violence and refugee crisis today in Syria, and the war in Iraq, which “will be written about for centuries because the full impact of it is not over yet.”
Reid, who is set to retire at the end of his term, reflected on his career and said his “biggest regret was voting for the Iraq war” after being “misled.”
