The Republican-controlled House on Friday passed its version of the annual defense policy bill, sprawling legislation that the chamber’s far-right members loaded with a wish list of divisive provisions seeking to roll back diversity protections and restrict service members and their families from accessing abortion and transgender health care.
The $895.3 billion National Defense Authorization Act, which sets Pentagon policy and guides funding for the year ahead, was approved by a vote of 217 to 199 — falling largely along party lines.
Initially hailed by the lawmakers who drafted it as a feat of bipartisanship, the bill that cleared the House sets up a clash — and likely a prolonged negotiation — with the Democratic-controlled Senate, as the two chambers work to reconcile and merge their separate versions of the legislation in the months ahead.
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This is exactly what happened last year, a fact many Democrats lamented angrily on the House floor this week.
“I wish I could say I’m surprised by the situation in which we find ourselves,” Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-N.J.), a former Navy helicopter pilot and a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said Thursday as Democrats argued against many of the amendments adopted by their GOP colleagues. “But I’m not.”
“Once again,” she said, Republicans are “choosing to use the National Defense Authorization Act to shove their extremist culture war agenda down the throats of the American people. hom*ophobia? Check. Racism? Check. Misogyny? Check. Serious policy amendments that will strengthen our national security? Far less important to this majority.”
While GOP defense hawks joined forces on the floor with centrist Democrats to defeat a few of the far-right’s proposals — such as an attempt by Rep. Marjorie Taylor-Greene (R-Ga.) to prohibit U.S. assistance for Ukraine — Republicans largely lined up in support of their colleagues’ most conservative proposals.
Among them was an amendment offered by Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Tex.) that would prohibit the Defense Department from covering any expenses for U.S. service members or their family members who must travel away from their bases — because of diminished access to reproductive care since the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade — to seek treatment out of state.
Van Duyne said her amendment would “protect the most vulnerable: the unborn” and disputed Democrats’ arguments that the proposal would endanger women by denying access to critical, sometimes lifesaving care. “Abortion is not medical care for the baby,” Van Duyne said during a debate over the amendment.
Last year, House Republicans attached an almost identical proposal to the House version of the NDAA, and separately Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) sought to force the Pentagon to end its travel-reimbursem*nt policy by blocking hundreds of military promotions and appointments. But that proposal — along with most other polarizing amendments offered last year — was stripped from the reconciled bill that eventually became law. Tuberville, too, ultimately backed down and ended his blockade amid pressure from within his party.
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Members of the House Armed Services Committee said the legislation originally approved by their panel authorizes badly needed improvements to service members’ pay and benefits, including a 19.5 percent raise for junior enlisted personnel, and expanded child-care access. It also directs upgrades to dilapidated military housing and other infrastructure; authorizes the expanded development and procurement of weapons and technology to maintain the United States’ military edge against an increasingly assertive China; bolsters the Pentagon’s role in U.S. border security and continues, or in some cases boosts, support for American partners such as Israel, Ukraine and Taiwan.
Also on Friday, the Senate Armed Services Committee announced completion of its $923.3 billion defense bill. Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) has not indicated when he expects to bring it to the floor. But Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), a senior member of the committee, said he’s not worried about reconciling the House and Senate bills and predicted that many items on the far right’s wish list would fall by the wayside.
“These are tough negotiations, but we’ve done it every year, and we’re going to do it this year,” Kaine told reporters during a conference call. “And my gut tells me that the final bill will look a little bit more like the Senate version than the House version with some of [the] cultural war provisions in — but most not.”
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Democrats appealed this week to House GOP leadership, hoping to avoid such a production this year, but those entreaties found little resonance, with lawmakers deeply divided in a presidential election year.
That many of the GOP’s most hard line amendments could get stripped out of the final bill is “not the point,” Rep. Byron Donalds (R-Fla.) told The Washington Post after the vote. “Regardless of what the end result might be, going through the process, having debate, having floor votes, getting a package that the majority of the House wants to see passed — [that] is what we should be doing,” he said.
As House members debated the merits of diversity protections and gender politics this week, they did so against the backdrop of November’s presidential contest. Former president Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican nominee, visited Capitol Hill on Thursday, holding separate meetings with House and Senate Republicans, with the notoriously combative candidate making a surprise appeal for the GOP, gripped by months of infighting, to come together.
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“There’s tremendous unity in the Republican Party. We want to see borders. We want to see a strong military. We want to see money not wasted all over the world,” he told reporters afterward.
Trump, those in attendance said, also urged GOP lawmakers to improve their messaging on abortion, saying the decision about access would be better left to the states. Even so, only two Republicans, Reps. Brian Fitzpatrick (R-Pa.) and John Duarte (R-Calif.) — both from swing districts that went to President Biden in 2020 — voted against Van Duyne’s amendment.
Far-right members also added measures to ensure Pentagon funding does not benefit Palestinian civilians, prohibiting money from being used for building or rebuilding the war-ravaged Gaza Strip when the war between Israel and Hamas ends, and barring the Defense Department from transporting Palestinian refugees to the United States. The Biden administration has not proposed either course of action.
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Members of the House Freedom Caucus successfully attached provisions that eliminate diversity, equality and inclusion (DEI) initiatives across the armed forces; and others to remove descriptions of sex and gender identity and studies of racial discrimination from Defense Department-funded programs and school curriculums.
“Quite frankly, if you don’t know if you’re a man or a woman, you shouldn’t have your hand on the button that launches missiles,” said Rep. Matt Rosendale (R-Mont.), urging adoption of his amendment to prohibit the Defense Department from providing hormone therapy and other gender-related health care to “individuals that identify as transgender.”
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, who countered that “Congress shouldn’t be making medical decisions,” called Rosendale’s assertions “completely wrong” and “bigoted and discriminatory.”
Smith, along with the vast majority of House Democrats, voted against the amended NDAA, after having urged Republicans earlier in the week to “save ourselves the aggravation” of attaching amendments that, he said would be stripped away eventually.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the NDAA is expected to face a less contentious amendment process, although the Senate’s starting version of the legislation is about $25 billion more than the House bill and above spending caps previously agreed upon by Congress.
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Both versions exceeded Biden’s funding requests in several areas, including in the procurement of additional submarines, which members of both parties have said are necessary to meet requirements spelled out in U.S. military partnerships and to compete with China. The House committee said its bill slashed billions of dollars in funding from current defense spending levels, while the Senate committee made fewer cuts.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-Miss.), the Armed Services committee’s top Republican, who has called for the United States to spend 5 percent of its gross domestic product on national defense, persuaded his colleagues to raise the bill’s top line to $923.3 billion, Senate Armed Services Committee staff said. The committee’s chairman, Sen. Jack Reed (D-R.I.), voted against the bill — a rarity for a committee head — because it exceeded the spending caps.
Paul Kane and Marianna Sotomayor contributed to this report.
