The Senate Appropriations Committee on Thursday approved a bill to fund the Pentagon in fiscal 2016 after a preview of the partisan fistfight that’s likely to bog down floor debate on the issue.
Though the panel approved the bill in a bipartisan 27-3 vote, Democrats, backed by the threat of a presidential veto, promised to try to block its consideration on the Senate floor unless Republicans agree to consider a “grand bargain” on the overall budget that ends mandatory sequestration cuts.
Senate Democrats plan to hold up all spending bills to try to force Republicans into making a deal months before the fiscal year ends Sept. 30. But the $575.9 billion defense appropriations bill is at the heart of the controversy because of GOP plans to shift $36.5 billion in operating and maintenance funds to a war account that’s exempt from sequestration.
“Why do we want to wait until the end of September to have this talk? It’s time to do this now,” Senate Minority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., said. His bid to shift that funding back into the base budget was defeated on a 14-16 party-line vote.
Republicans accuse Democrats of holding defense funding “hostage” to win increased spending on social programs and other domestic priorities. At Thursday’s meeting, Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn., suggested their approach also “neuters the Senate.”
“When did we start shutting down the Senate when the president announced that he might veto a bill?” he asked. “Let’s bring it to the floor, pass it and if he vetoes it, then we can have a discussion.”
Added Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., who’s also a member of the appropriations panel: “Anything the president objects to we don’t go forward on? I don’t think that’s a great place to be.”
President Obama and both Republican and Democratic leaders all have called for an end to sequestration, which was enacted as part of the Budget Control Act of 2011. Military leaders have repeatedly complained that it’s causing a crisis in defense readiness as the gap between what the armed forces are being asked to do and Pentagon funding grows.
The mandatory across-the-board cuts were never supposed to have gone into effect, but rather serve as an incentive to find a long-term bipartisan budget agreement after years of partisan squabbling over spending.
Lawmakers were unable to reach agreement, and that impasse has endured, leading them to embrace stopgap measures such as a bipartisan deal in December 2013 that restored $31.5 billion in mandatory cuts for fiscal 2015 by extending sequestration savings through 2023.
