With all the drama playing out on the north side of Capitol Hill around the confirmation hearings of Judge Brett Kavanaugh, it’s easy to lose sight of the fact that on the south side, the House of Representatives has returned to work. Indeed, the House has been busy passing legislation, including one bill that ought to be considered, in the words of Texas Republican Rep. Mac Thornberry, “a big deal.”
Late Wednesday afternoon, in the shadow of Senate theatrics, the House passed the Defense Appropriations Act by a vote of 361 to 61. Congress has still not returned fully to “regular order,” though. The bill also included the appropriations for the Departments of Labor, Education, and Health and Human Services, which ought to be funded through their own bills. Most importantly, thought, the bill contains a continuing resolution that keeps the rest of the government open while Congress rushes to finish the remaining appropriations bills.
Trump will sign defense bill despite lack of wall funding
President Donald Trump has promised to sign the $854 billion spending package despite a lack of what he considers to be adequate funding for his wall along the U.S.-Mexico border. No one really wanted a government shutdown five weeks before the midterm elections, and once the president signs this bill, we’ll be free of that prospect. Congressional leaders wisely attached the continuing resolution to the defense bill, betting that Trump was far less likely to veto it than either a freestanding continuing resolution or one attached to a “less important” bill.
Last week, the president signed an bill that funds military construction, the Department of Veterans Affairs, Department of Energy, the legislative branch, and several independent agencies. Fiscal Year 2019 begins Monday, and Congress still has a lot of work to do to fund the government. But the passage of this latest bill marks the first time in a decade that the Department of Defense will have its money before the start of the fiscal year.
America faces “diverse and wide-ranging threats”
Rep. Thornberry, who oversees the DoD as chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, said in a statement, “The challenge ahead of us now is to repeat this achievement next year, and the year after that. To truly restore strength, efficiency, and agility to the military, fully funding the Pentagon on time has to be the rule in Washington, not the exception.”
When the Senate passed the bill nearly two weeks ago, Sen. James Inhofe, the Republican from Oklahoma who assumed the chairmanship of the Senate Armed Services Committee after the death of Sen. John McCain, expressed similar sentiments. “Unlike any other time in our nation’s history, we are facing diverse and wide-ranging threats,” Inhofe said. “It has never been more important to ensure our military has stable, reliable, adequate and on time funding.”
Defense Readiness and modernization at stake
The 56 most conservative members of the House, known as the Freedom Caucus, formed the bulk of the “no” votes. Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio took to Twitter to explain his vote. He said that the bill “Funds what we said we wouldn’t (Planned Parenthood), Doesn’t fund what we said we would (border security wall), AND continues the record spending.”
While Jordan is correct on all three counts, funding the military is the most pressing issue facing the nation. We can (and will) argue and debate for years over the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan – but it remains an inescapable fact that those wars, and the years of budget cuts at the hands of “sequestration,” have taken a toll on military readiness and modernization.
Of the Army’s 58 active and National Guard brigade combat teams, only three were ready to go to war when Gen. Mark Milley, the Army’s chief of staff, testified in January. Readiness comes from having the right mix of the right equipment, in the right state of repair, with the right soldiers, trained to an adequate level on the relevant skills. All of that requires a reliable stream of funding.
It’s a complex process to get a new tank, or any other piece of military hardware for that matter. As I wrote in July, there isn’t a tank dealership we can go to and pick out our M1 Abrams replacement and drive it home. Complex processes are made more complex when the people trying to manage the process don’t know when they’re going to get the money to pay the bills, or even how much they’re going to get.
Thornberry is exactly right: if we’re truly interested in restoring military readiness, Congress needs to do this sort of thing more often.
