By Jen DiMascio
Despite a recent stalemate in conference negotiations on a bill to authorize defense spending for fiscal year 2008, the chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee said last week the bill would move forward next month.
“We’re going to get a defense authorization bill passed this year. We have to. We should. We’re going to. So it’s a necessity, and it’s the right thing to do,” Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) said.
The breakdown in negotiations has occurred over the inclusion of hate crimes legislation that has passed in the House and that the president previously threatened to veto.
Including the language in the defense authorization bill may jeopardize passage of the entire bill, according to Rep. Neil Abercrombie (D-Hawaii), the chairman of a key House Armed Services subcommittee.
Levin acknowledged the difficulty late last week, saying he is looking at other options for passing the bill that was added as an amendment to the Senate bill.
“The question is whether we can get a hate crimes bill this year,” he said.
Other Democratic senators said on Nov. 16 that they support both the defense authorization bill and the hate crimes bill, but do not want the coupling of the bills to interfere passing the defense measure.
“If it’s going to be the one thing that would cause defense authorization to fail, then I don’t think it ought to be there. Defense authorization is too important to have it fail for that reason,” Sen. Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) said of the hate crimes bill.
Sen. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) expressed a similar opinion.
“I want to get a defense bill. I support hate crimes, but I don’t want to see the defense authorization bill go down,” he said.
In addition to the hate crimes language, the president said in a July Statement of Administration Policy that he would veto the defense bill over a provision that would require the intelligence community to provide information to the armed services committees within 15 days of a request.
Asked about lingering administration concerns about the authorization bill Levin said, “I think we basically have addressed the issues that have been identified as the most problematical.”
Before leaving for a two-week recess, the Senate blessed the nominations of John Young, to be the next Pentagon acquisition chief, Douglas Brook to be the Navy’s next comptroller and of Robert Smolen to be the deputy administrator for defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration.