If Congress passes the Bipartisan Budget Agreement that was rolled out earlier this week, defense appropriators are ready to pounce on finishing a line-by-line spending bill by Jan. 15 to keep the Pentagon running for the remainder of the fiscal year, a top Senate Democrat said Thursday.
Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.), assistant majority leader of the Senate and chairman of the defense appropriations subcommittee, said that he had met Thursday morning with Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen (R-N.J.), the new chairman of the House’s defense appropriations subcommittee, who took over when former chairman Bill Young (R-Fla.) died in October. A continuing resolution currently funds government departments and expires mid-January, at which point Congress would need to either pass a dozen appropriations bills or another continuing resolution to fund the government at last year’s levels for even longer.
“We sat down and started talking about what it will take. We think we know, if the Murray-Ryan [Bipartisan Budget] Agreement goes through, what our budget number is going to be,” he said, referring to the $520 billion spending cap set for defense in fiscal year 2014. “We’ve already started working to get 60 percent of the discretionary spending in the budget taken care of in our appropriation bill. That’s how quickly we can move once this agreement becomes the law. So I encourage the members on both sides, in the House and the Senate, Democrats and Republicans: vote for this. Let’s move, let’s govern, let’s not shut down this government again. This is an opportunity, and with this opportunity we can have a stronger national defense, a stronger country, and we can save the taxpayers money.”
Durbin warned, however, that no one should assume the budget deal will pass. Some hard-right Republicans are upset the new bill increases spending levels – it reduces the sequester on defense spending from a $54-billion across-the-board cut in FY ’14 to a $32-billion one. And some Democrats are upset that the sequester wasn’t removed altogether, and that the budget deal did not include an extension of unemployment insurance, which expires Dec. 28.
The House passed the budget deal in a Thursday evening vote after debate, at times heated, earlier in the afternoon. Though many agree a budget plan is needed, support for the plan had been lukewarm. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and Democratic Whip Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) both said they would not “whip” the bill, or push members to support it; rather, they said they would let each member decide if the bill was something he or she could endorse.