House passes defense bill after spending-cap fight

$612B measure has $89B for emergencies

WASHINGTON -- House lawmakers on Friday passed a roughly $612 billion annual military-spending bill, concluding a week of fighting on matters ranging from congressionally mandated spending caps to immigration.

The National Defense Authorization Act passed 269-151 in a largely party-line vote. Arkansas' four representatives, all Republicans, voted for the measure.

"Whatever our troops need to get the job done, they should get it, and the House has acted to provide just that," said House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio. "With all the threats our troops face and the sacrifices they make, Democrats' opposition to this defense bill is in fact indefensible."

Democrats were particularly upset over Republican attempts to circumvent the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration that began in 2013, saying they could not accept any increases in military spending without equivalent increases for other programs.

But in a maneuver intended to skirt the military-spending caps, the legislation includes roughly $89 billion in an Overseas Contingency Operations fund, which is reserved for emergency military operations and exempt from sequestration.

Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., said he did not mind the increases in military spending but that Congress needs "to be taking care of domestic things, too."

"There's too many things we need to deal with -- the things that help people who aspire to get into the middle class and stay in the middle class," Cummings said. "My concerns are more those kinds of issues, you know, some kind of balance here. I believe in a strong military, but I also believe that we need to have a strong country."

Democrats warned that Republicans won't do the same end-run around spending caps when it comes to financing nondefense agencies later this year, opening the door to sharp cuts in domestic spending.

House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said the defense bill would be a prelude to reductions that would "devastate other vital pillars of our national strength," including homeland security, veterans, road building and other programs.

In a letter to her colleagues Thursday evening, Pelosi urged her party's lawmakers to vote against the military-spending bill.

"The Republican defense authorization bill before the House is both bad budgeting and harmful to military planning -- perpetuating uncertainty and instability in the defense budget, and damaging the military's ability to plan and prepare for the future," Pelosi wrote. "Republicans should come together with Democrats in a fiscally responsible way to protect our national security and grow our economy."

Overall, the House bill authorizes $515 billion for national defense and another $89.2 billion for the emergency war-fighting fund for a total of $604.2 billion. Another $7.7 billion is mandatory defense spending that doesn't get authorized by Congress.

That means the bill would provide the entire $611.9 billion desired by President Barack Obama, but he and Democratic lawmakers still opposed it.

Democrats said putting money in the war account and not the base budget prevents the Pentagon from doing long-term planning for costly programs and weapons systems.

"Clearly, this desperate attempt to get around the budget caps put in place by Congress will have a significant negative effect on our military," said Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee.

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, the panel's chairman, has acknowledged that padding the war-fighting account was not the best way to "run a railroad."

"I agree that we ought to find a better way to find fiscal discipline without the arbitrary caps ... but this bill can't do that," Thornberry said. "If this bill fails, how does that get us closer to fixing our budget problems?"

The White House has pushed back against several provisions in the bill, including one that would make it harder for Obama to close the military prison for terrorism suspects at Guantanamo Bay by imposing stiffer requirements for transferring these people to other countries. On Ukraine, it calls for arming Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed separatists, a move the Obama administration has so far resisted.

The bill also contained a measure, added by Republicans on Thursday evening, that would increase restrictions on the transfer of detainees to combat zones, including Yemen.

The administration also opposes measures that aim to bypass the Iraqi government and give money directly to Iraqi Kurdish fighters. That has angered Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, who threatened to attack U.S. interests if the provision passes.

Obama has threatened to veto the legislation, which Defense Secretary Ashton Carter last week described as "clearly a road to nowhere."

Republicans, however, also faced one major obstacle, in the form of pro-immigration language that Rep. Ruben Gallego, D-Ariz., attached to the legislation in a bipartisan committee vote. Gallego, a Marine Corps veteran, offered an amendment that would have allowed Congress to encourage the Pentagon to consider allowing young illegal aliens to serve in the military.

Despite the provision having, in the words of Gallego himself, "no teeth," roughly two dozen Republicans, led by Rep. Mo Brooks of Alabama, warned that the amendment could sink the entire bill, and Brooks offered an amendment of his own to strip out Gallego's language. On Thursday evening, Brooks' amendment passed, 221-202, helping pave the way for the military-spending bill's final passage. Twenty Republicans voted against the Brooks amendment.

But it was a debate Republicans, who have long struggled to make inroads with Hispanic voters, were loath to have publicly. "It's unfortunate," said Rep. Mario Diaz-Balart, R-Fla., who voted against the amendment. "But it's part of the process."

And Democrats were quick to seize on that vote to criticize their Republican counterparts. "This is yet another example of anti-immigrant attitude on the part of the house Republicans," Pelosi said.

Rep. Linda Sanchez, D-Calif., chairman of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus, said the young people simply "want the opportunity to put their lives on the line for a country that has given them opportunity."

"I would hate to see the time and the talent and the desire of these young people to serve their country squashed by people who will attack them at every turn, for no reasons, simply than they are other," she said.

On Thursday, the Senate voted its own version of the military spending bill out of committee, 22-4. The House and the Senate versions still need to be reconciled in a joint negotiation, which could happen as early as this summer.

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said he hoped the two chambers could ultimately work together to produce a bill the president will sign.

"We've got to reform -- otherwise we lose what little confidence that remains on the part of the American taxpayer that their tax dollars are spent wisely," McCain said. "I hope that we can satisfy some of those concerns. But when a president vetoes the defense authorization bill, it's a very serious step."

Information for this article was contributed by Ashley Parker and Emmarie Huetteman of The New York Times and by Deb Riechmann of The Associated Press.

A Section on 05/16/2015

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