After failing three times to advance a fiscal 2017 defense spending bill, senators are looking for other ways to advance the appropriations bill that keeps the military running.
Senators tried again this month to get closure on the defense appropriations bill that had already failed twice prior to the August recess, but could not advance it again on a 55-34 vote.
Asked if Republican leadership would tee up a fourth cloture vote, Don Stewart, the chief of staff for Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, said that “next up is the CR,” or continuing resolution.
“Dems have continued to filibuster funding for our troops,” Stewart said.
Democrats are blocking the bill over concerns that Republicans will put the rest of the government under a continuing resolution, which locks in funding at last year’s level and prevents the start of new projects, once they have a defense budget that’s been signed into law.
Justin Johnson, an analyst with the Heritage Foundation, said any further votes in the Senate would happen only because leaders see some political value, but that it’s unclear if voters at the state and local level are paying attention to this stalemate.
Experts agree that lawmakers will most likely pass a short-term continuing resolution to prevent the government from shutting down on Oct. 1, but beyond that, senators have a few options to advance the defense spending bill, Johnson said.
One would see a few spending bills tied together into a so-called “minibus,” Johnson said. A national security minibus could see the spending bills for veterans, defense and homeland security all tied together, something that might be more palatable to Democrats since they’ll be assured of the passage of more than just the defense bill.
“If you start lumping bills together, it becomes harder for the Democrats to oppose it because their priorities are spread across a number of bills,” he said. “Their core argument seems to be we don’t want a defense bill unless we know for a fact we’ll get everything else.
They don’t want a defense bill to pass, then get a CR for the rest of the government … If you start offering them pieces, that argument holds less and less water.”
Asked if he thought a minibus plan could work in the Senate, Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala., and a senior member of the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee, said he expects any plan to be pushed until later in the year.
“I don’t think that will happen right now,” he said. “I think it’s a little early for that. We’ll have a lame-duck session looming.”
Another option would be to attach a couple appropriations bills to a continuing resolution, something that’s been done in the past, Johnson said.
Michael O’Hanlon, an analyst at the Brookings Institution, said he’s hopeful that lawmakers will find a way to break the impasse since they’ll be eager to get back to their home states to continue campaigning.
“I am hopeful, for the simple reason that it’s not in anyone’s interest this fall to let this drag on. All members and one-third of all senators have an intense personal interest in getting out of town,” he said. “That is an important factor that looms larger and larger as the month unfolds.”
In addition to gridlock and a tight timeline in an election year, the spending bills face another hurdle: differences between the House and Senate versions must be reconciled before it heads to the president’s desk.
The Senate bill matches the president’s requested budget level, but the House bill takes about $18 billion from the Pentagon’s war chest and puts it toward base priorities, leaving the overseas contingency operations account to run dry in March.
This is the same budgeting tactic taken by the House Armed Services Committee in its version of the fiscal 2017 defense authorization bill.
