Defense bill stalls as Republicans and Democrats blame each other
Every year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the one bill that gets significant floor debate and legions of amendments before being passed, but this year could be different. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Armed Services ranking Republican John McCain (R-AZ) are fighting over the issue now. Reid actually tried to ...
Every year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the one bill that gets significant floor debate and legions of amendments before being passed, but this year could be different. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Armed Services ranking Republican John McCain (R-AZ) are fighting over the issue now.
Every year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) is the one bill that gets significant floor debate and legions of amendments before being passed, but this year could be different. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) and Senate Armed Services ranking Republican John McCain (R-AZ) are fighting over the issue now.
Reid actually tried to bring the NDAA up for debate on Saturday, Sept. 22, at 1:40 in the morning, after the Senate had discharged all of its business and well after almost all senators had left town for their pre-election recess.
Senate Minority Jon Kyl (R-AZ) objected to Reid’s move because Reid wanted unanimous consent to structure the debate with limited amendments and because Kyl couldn’t check with his caucus, as almost all senators had left the chamber.
McCain wants open amendments, as has been the practice in the past. McCain’s office accused Reid of calling up the bill just to be able to say he gave Republicans the chance to debate the NDAA, even if that chance came in the middle of the night when no one was around.
"This was nothing more than a cheap procedural ploy to divert blame for the Senate’s failure — for the first time in a half-century — to debate and pass the most important piece of national security legislation that Congress considers," a McCain spokesman told The Cable.
"Ever since the bill was reported out of the Senate Armed Services Committee in May, Senator McCain has gone to the floor time and again asking Senator Reid to bring the NDAA to the floor for debate, as has been the Senate’s practice for 50 years. For four months, Senator Reid has refused these requests, and the Senate under his leadership has been declared the least productive since 1947," the spokesman said.
"So literally in the dead of night — at 1:40 a.m. Saturday morning and after the last vote when all but a few Senators had gone home — Senator Reid puts forward this gambit to ask for a Unanimous Consent agreement to move to NDAA with limited amendments at some unspecified time during the lame-duck session after the elections," the spokesman said. "As Senator Kyl correctly pointed out that morning on the floor, Senator Reid intentionally posed this request — which requires Unanimous Consent from all 100 senators — after the Senate’s business was essentially done and most senators had gone home. Even by Senator Reid’s standards, this was not a serious attempt to address this critical legislation."
In the past, the bill has become the vehicle for legislative items of all shapes and sizes, such as legislation increasing penalties for hate crimes, because it is the most likely bill to be completed before year’s end and is sure to pass.
After Reid tried to call up the bill and limit debate to only "relevant" amendments, Kyl decried the tactic and said Reid was ignoring the fact that McCain and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin (D-MI) had been working on an agreement to move the bill.
"Everybody knows that you can’t get unanimous consent of your colleagues when they’re all gone at 1:40 a.m. in the morning without any advance notice that the request was going to be made," Kyl said. "We don’t know what our members would agree to, whether they would agree to limiting this to relevant amendments or not… What mostly bothers me is the implications, therefore, that the leader’s all for taking it up and it’s Republicans that are objecting."
Reid is indeed arguing that Kyl’s objection means that Republicans are in fact holding up the bill and that the GOP has been holding up the defense bill for six months. A Democratic Senate leadership aide told The Cable Monday that Democrats intended to point to Kyl’s objection to argue that the GOP is holding up the defense bill.
"It’s odd that Republicans would lament the Defense Authorization bill’s status when one of their own leaders objected to Senator Reid’s request to take it up and pass it on Saturday," the aide said. "Senator Reid has been telling Senator McCain and others for over two months now that he’d bring Defense Authorization to the floor once Republicans agreed to actually debate the bill and forego irrelevant amendments. For over two months, his offer has been rejected. Saturday made it clear yet again: Republicans would rather play political games than advance important legislation."
Josh Rogin covers national security and foreign policy and writes the daily Web column The Cable. His column appears bi-weekly in the print edition of The Washington Post. He can be reached for comments or tips at josh.rogin@foreignpolicy.com.
Previously, Josh covered defense and foreign policy as a staff writer for Congressional Quarterly, writing extensively on Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, U.S.-Asia relations, defense budgeting and appropriations, and the defense lobbying and contracting industries. Prior to that, he covered military modernization, cyber warfare, space, and missile defense for Federal Computer Week Magazine. He has also served as Pentagon Staff Reporter for the Asahi Shimbun, Japan's leading daily newspaper, in its Washington, D.C., bureau, where he reported on U.S.-Japan relations, Chinese military modernization, the North Korean nuclear crisis, and more.
A graduate of George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs, Josh lived in Yokohama, Japan, and studied at Tokyo's Sophia University. He speaks conversational Japanese and has reported from the region. He has also worked at the House International Relations Committee, the Embassy of Japan, and the Brookings Institution.
Josh's reporting has been featured on CNN, MSNBC, C-Span, CBS, ABC, NPR, WTOP, and several other outlets. He was a 2008-2009 National Press Foundation's Paul Miller Washington Reporting Fellow, 2009 military reporting fellow with the Knight Center for Specialized Journalism and the 2011 recipient of the InterAction Award for Excellence in International Reporting. He hails from Philadelphia and lives in Washington, D.C. Twitter: @joshrogin
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