The Republican chairman of the House Armed Services Committee on Tuesday said President Obama’s threat to veto defense legislation is undermining efforts to urge other countries to spend more on defense.
Rep. Mac Thornberry of Texas noted in a speech to the Atlantic Council Tuesday that Defense Secretary Ash Carter is in Europe this week for a meeting with NATO defense ministers in an effort to get them to increase defense spending amid increased Russian aggression.
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“History has a way of turning irony into tragedy, because today, Secretary of Defense Carter is in Europe working to bolster the NATO alliance commitment to spending more money on defense and to stiffening spines agains the Russians,” Thornberry said. “And he does that just as the president is holding hostage his [the fiscal 2016] request to increase funding for defense.
“My suggestion is nothing would send a stronger signal and to bolster Secretary Carter’s message than for the president to agree to sign the defense bills with the money that he asked for,” he said.
No one in Congress is happy with the plan to skirt sequester-related budget cuts by shifting $38 billion in regular operations and maintenance spending into a war-funding account not subject to the cuts. But lawmakers have to go down that road in order to keep military readiness at a minimum level while lawmakers are at an impasse on overall budget matters, Thornberry said.
Thornberry said he wants to get rid of the budget sequestration mandated by a 2011 law and make Pentagon funding more consistent and predictable. “But holding defense spending hostage for the EPA is not the way to achieve that,” he said.
The president, backed by congressional Democrats, has insisted that increases in defense spending be part of an overall agreement on the budget that removes mandatory caps on domestic spending as well.
Senate Democrats last week blocked consideration of the fiscal 2016 defense appropriations bill for the Pentagon, which passed the House on June 11. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., moved Tuesday for reconsideration of the vote, setting up the possibility that senators may be able to consider the bill next week.
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Obama also has threatened to veto the authorization bill, which sets policy for the Pentagon, because it allows the funding shift. The Senate successfully passed that bill last week, and Thornberry said House and Senate conferees would work out differences between the versions passed by each chamber and send the legislation to the president.
“I hope he will do the right thing,” Thornberry said of Obama.
“To threaten to veto that really makes no sense. It is just political hysterics, or to force a confrontation.”
Thornberry’s remarks came a day after the Pentagon’s No. 2 official said the president’s veto threat will likely force Congress to get rid of sequestration.
“Because of the president’s strong veto threat, and because we’ve now demonstrated veto-sustaining votes in the House and Senate,” things have changed, Deputy Defense Secretary Bob Work told an audience at Rand Corp., according to Defense News. “The whole point of this is to try and encourage both sides of the aisle and both chambers of Congress to get together and do another Ryan-Murray-type bipartisan budget agreement. That is the purpose of our strategy. And at least right now, we have set up the conditions for that to occur.”
