The Senate passed the Bipartisan Budget Agreement Wednesday evening in a 64-36 vote, reducing sequestration for fiscal years 2014 and 2015 and allowing the appropriations committees to begin developing a line-by-line spending bill before Jan. 15.
Several senators took to the floor Wednesday to lobby against the budget agreement because, of the $85 billion in savings it creates in this year and next, $6 billion comes as a result of decreasing the Cost of Living Adjustment for military retirees’ pensions. Senate Budget Committee chairwoman Patty Murray (D-Wash.) urged her colleagues to pass the bill as is, since the House is not around to agree to any changes, and to allow the COLA issue to be addressed when Congress returns in January.
Senate Armed Services Committee leadership vowed to take up the issue as part of a larger look at military and veterans benefits, which the Pentagon has tried to reduce in its budget requests in recent years but Congress has thus far refused to do.
SASC Ranking Member Jim Inhofe (R-Okla.) released a statement immediately after the budget deal’s passage saying he voted against the deal because it did not fulfill Congress’s duty to “provide for the common defense.”
COLA aside–which he too vowed to address next year–Inhofe said that the agreement “continued the discriminatory nature of the sequester cuts by maintaining disproportionate cuts to our military, a budget that has already been cut by $487 billion under the Obama administration. While the deal provided some relief to our military men and women, it was not a significant enough fix to ease the impacts sequestration will have on their readiness.”
Inhofe added that he would introduce a bill to phase the budget cuts “in a way that would allow our senior military leaders to enact reforms without degrading our ability to train and prepare our military to defend the United States. Unlike the [Bipartisan Budget Agreement], my bill provides both the funding and time necessary in the first two years to implement critical reforms to preserve our military capability and readiness.”
Passing that bill in time to help this fiscal year, however, would be very difficult. Congress only has until Jan. 15 to pass appropriations bills that take this budget agreement’s total spending cap and turn it into a line-by-line spending bill.
Next for the Senate comes the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014. The Senate voted 71-29 on Wednesday evening to end debate, meaning that a final vote on passage of the bill would come within 30 hours.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) took to the Senate floor Wednesday morning to praise the content of the defense authorization bill, but he slammed the process used to get the bill to a floor vote.
SASC passed the bill in June, McConnell noted, but the bill was not brought to the Senate floor until November. A fight over amendments derailed the bill’s passage before Thanksgiving, leaving the House to pass a new compromise bill last week and the Senate forced to pass the bill–again with no amendments–this week.
“Now, with just days to go before Christmas–after wasting valuable time ramming through political appointee after political appointee–the majority wants to rush this crucial legislation through without the debate it deserves,” McConnell said. “They want to push it through the Senate without even giving the minority the ability to offer more than a single amendment. Just to give you some perspective, 381 amendments were proposed to this bill last year, and we agreed on 142 of them. The year before that, hundreds were again proposed and many were agreed to.
McConnell conceded that he liked much of the content of the defense bill.
“It contains the authorization needed for key military construction projects on our military bases, for multi-year procurement that’s more efficient–that saves the taxpayers money–and for the combat pay and special pay our troops deserve,” McConnell said. “And it authorizes funding for the next generation of aircraft carriers, something that’s central to the success of the President’s ‘pivot’ to the Asian theater.”
However, he added that “the bill before us would be markedly improved if Senators were allowed to offer amendments, and more than just a day or two to debate it.”