A top Senate Republican expects to break with his party to vote against the defense spending “minibus” despite it including $1.4 billion in border barrier funding for the Trump administration.
“I’m certainly leaning that way. I’ll take a look at what the final — probably awful — deal is,” Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee Chairman Ron Johnson told reporters outside a committee hearing on Wednesday. “I do want to support the appropriations for the military, but when you take a look at all the bad stuff that’s gonna be put in there, it’s not gonna be an easy ‘yes’ vote, that’s for sure.”
Johnson said his biggest holdup is that Democrats did not include enough money to rebuild the military from the years during the Obama administration when funding dropped.
The defense minibus is one of two fiscal 2020 spending packages the House passed earlier this week that are expected to go before the Senate for votes Thursday. The defense minibus includes $860 billion for the Pentagon, DHS, and other related agencies. If passed this week, the money would become available Dec. 21, when the short-term spending bill runs out, and will last through the end of fiscal 2020 next September.
House appropriators included $1.375 billion for border security projects, such as fencing, technology, and paved roads. That is the same amount of money Congress approved for fiscal 2018 and 2019 and more than four times the $341 million it allotted in fiscal 2017.
“It’s a huge win if you look at it from the totality of the circumstances,” Rep. Chuck Fleischmann, a member of the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Homeland Security, told the Washington Examiner. “Getting the $1.4 billion from the appropriations process was a continued win, but the real key victory to this agreement, and the hard thing that we had to persuade the Democrats to finally agree to, was to give the administration the ability to reprogram funds as they see fit and also where they see fit.”
A group of liberal House Democrats unsuccessfully pushed to curtail President Trump’s ability to repurpose defense funding for border security projects, as he did in February.
Trump in the spring requested $5 billion for the border fence and $3.6 billion to refill a defense fund that he allocated $3.6 billion from in February under a national emergency order to fund 175 miles of new border fence.
So far, one border barrier project awaiting funds from the Defense Department for $2.6 billion has been given the green light by the Supreme Court after a legal challenge. Another, this one for $3.6 billion, from the fund Trump wants replenished, is stalled in a lower district court.
House Homeland Security Appropriations Subcommittee Chairwoman Lucille Roybal-Allard helped put the bill together but voted against it on Tuesday. In a statement released after, the California Democrat said the legislation completely fails to protect Congress’s “constitutional power of the purse.”
“While the bill includes many priorities I support, it opens the door for the president to keep going around Congress to spend funds as he sees fit, including more money for border barriers and detention beds,” Roybal-Allard wrote.
The Congressional Hispanic Caucus came out Tuesday against the bill and criticized House Democratic appropriators for not using this as a chance to “rein in DHS.”
Despite some opposition to it in both parties, Fleischmann predicted the Senate would provide “more than sufficient” bipartisan support to pass the bill. The White House and congressional leaders struck a deal on items within it earlier this week.
