A group of House Democrats will take another run this week at stopping President Trump and the Pentagon from developing low-yield nuclear weapons.
The new warhead program would be defunded by $65 million in the coming year under an amendment to a Department of Energy appropriations bill proposed by Reps. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., Earl Blumenauer, D-Ore., John Garamendi, D-Calif., and Dan Kildee, D-Mich.
The spending bill could hit the House floor late this week following Rules Committee meetings on Tuesday and Wednesday to decide if their amendment will get a vote.
The proposal is the latest effort by Democrats on both sides of Capitol Hill to block development of a low-yield nuclear warhead for Trident missiles on Ohio-class submarines and sea-launched cruise missiles.
The weapons are a new initiative in the Pentagon’s Nuclear Posture Review released this year. The administration says the smaller nuclear warheads are needed to deter Russia, which believes it could deter the U.S. by using its own version of the weapons in an “escalate to de-escalate” scenario.
The Republican-held Rules Committee chaired by Rep. Pete Sessions, R-Texas, would have to agree to allow a vote on the nuclear weapons amendment, and it remains unlikely Democrats could summon the votes if it does. The committee meeting on amendments is slated for Wednesday.
A similar proposal by Blumenauer and Garamendi was rebuffed by the House’s Republican majority during passage of the 2019 National Defense Authorization Act last month.
“To pretend that we can control nuclear war — and that a “small-scale” nuclear war can stay small — flies in the face of common sense,” Blumenauer wrote a “Dear Colleague” letter to House lawmakers urging support before the amendment was defeated.
Meanwhile, Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee tried but failed to add a measure prohibiting the weapons to that chamber’s Department of Energy spending bill when it passed the panel on May 24.
“While I’m disappointed the bill includes unnecessary funding for new nuclear weapons, this bill is the result of a truly bipartisan process and I look forward to bringing it to the Senate floor,” Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-Calif., the ranking member of the energy and water subcommittee, said in a statement for the Democrat minority.
The bills are among the first annual appropriations legislation to head to the House and Senate floors and represent an opportunity for Democrats. Neither chamber has yet published 2019 defense spending bills, which could also draw a fight over the low-yield nuclear weapons.
