A member of the Senate Armed Services Committee said he hopes the defense authorization bill will not have to wait until December for final passage like last year, but with so many big issues crammed into the legislative calendar, it may come to that again.
Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) said Congress needs to quickly reach an agreement on raising the debt limit so it can move on to a slew of other important bills.
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| photo courtesy Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) |
“We gotta get beyond that to address any number of major issues that, once we get to January, they’re going to be harder to deal with–everybody knows that we get to January, it’s an election year, things tend to fall off the table,” he said Oct. 8 at Politico’s Cyber7 event in Washington. “So the critical point of time, in my opinion, is between now and the end of the year.”
Within that window of time, he said last year proved it was challenging to have a meaningful debate on important issues when working through a conference committee in December.
“I know [Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl] Levin is pushing hard, unfortunately we got a little setback with [Ranking Member James] Inhofe having some health issues, so that’s probably going to delay us a short time,” Chambliss said. Inhofe underwent a quadruple bypass surgery late last week after doctors discovered a blockage, the senator said in a statement. “But it’s the next major bill sitting out there,” and if Congress won’t pass its normal appropriations bills, then the defense authorization bill ought to be the next main priority, he argued.
The full House of Representatives passed its defense authorization bill on June 14 and sent it over to the Senate. The Senate Armed Services Committee has passed its own version of the authorization bill on June 13, and that legislation now awaits a full Senate vote before the two chambers can begin to work out the differences. It is unclear at this point when the full Senate might be able to devote its attention to military spending and policy.
“We do have major issues that are staring us in the face and have got to be taken care of,” Chambliss said. “Cybersecurity obviously, in my opinion, hits that best. But cybersecurity gets crowded out by [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] modernization, and immigration has been pushed off, and there are a number of other key issues out there like the defense authorization bill that have got to be done. And the clock is ticking, time is running out. And here we are, we’re arguing over money and saying we’re going to shut down the government unless we defund Obamacare.”