The House on Thursday continued considering the fiscal year 2025 National Defense Authorization Act, debating a series of amendments aimed at prohibiting further Ukraine aid and a slew of GOP-proposed policy measures that Democrats have called “poison pills.”
Ahead of a likely vote on final passage of the defense policy bill on Friday, the House is continuing through a series of votes that has included a bipartisan effort to block a measure from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) that would have disallowed the use of funds for assistance to Ukraine.
“The problem with this amendment is it would cut off funds to maintain the deployment of Marines to secure our embassy in Kyiv and it would also cut off the DoD’s ability to conduct end-use monitoring of weapon systems the U.S. already provided to Ukraine. We don’t want [those weapons] to fall into bad hands,” Rep. Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), chair of the House Armed Services Committee, said on Thursday.
The House ultimately voted 74-343 against adopting Greene’s amendment to the NDAA.
“I think it’s extremely important for members of Congress to be able to vote separately for funding for foreign wars, and I do not believe that funding for Ukraine should be a part of the NDAA,” Greene said on Thursday.
As part of a larger amendment package, the House did adopt by voice vote measures from Rep. Warren Davidson (R-Ohio) prohibiting funding to Ukraine until President Biden submits to Congress a strategy for U.S. support to Kyiv and one from Rep. Paul Gosar (R-Ariz.) blocking the shifting of funds from barracks construction to facilitate further aid to Ukraine.
“The reality is if we keep cutting checks, Ukraine does not have the resources, the manpower or the skill to deploy all the weapons it will take to extract all the Russians from Ukraine. They just don’t. We want them to be able to do that but we’ve also taken off the table a path to a peaceful resolution,” Davidson said on Thursday. “The point of this bill is to say tell us exactly what you’re trying to do.”
Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the HASC ranking member, pushed back on Davidson’s amendment during debate on Thursday.
“There has been a clear mission that the Biden administration has articulated on two points. Number one, preserve a sovereign, democratic Ukraine. Number two, don’t get into a war with Russia. They have said that from day one and over and over and over again. I have heard people that don’t want to support Ukraine continually generate this excuse, ‘Oh, it’s not clear. We don’t know what we’re doing there.’ We’ve known what we’re doing there from day one. We’re trying to stop Russia from destroying Ukraine,” Smith said.
The House also voted 134-286 against adopting an amendment from Reps. Matt Gaetz (R-Fla.) and Sara Jacobs (D-Calif.) that would have prohibited the transfer of cluster munitions, which the U.S. has previously provided in weapons aid packages for Ukraine.
“If Congress continues to flood the battlefield in Ukraine with indiscriminate killing instruments like cluster munitions, the blood of everyone impacted, including children harmed, will indeed be on our hands. We should halt the transfer of cluster munitions to any country. We stand rarely isolated in the modern world by still sending these things. I mean, we’re still demining cluster munitions in Laos, for goodness’ sake,” Gaetz said.
Gaetz and Jacobs, who noted that “most U.S. allies, including almost every NATO member” have joined the Convention on Cluster Munitions banning the use of such weapons, offered the same amendment during HASC’s markup that was also voted down.
“We are opposed to this amendment because we want this war to end. We want to bring this war to a conclusion. And the Ukrainians need these munitions to fight for their freedom. No one wants to be in this position of having to argue in favor of cluster munitions, but this is the reality on the ground for Ukraine today. It’s also the reality on the ground that the Russians are using far more cluster munitions with far higher dud rates,” Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) said on Thursday.
The House began its NDAA debate on Wednesday with Democrats warning GOP-proposed “poison pill amendments” are set to hinder the typical bipartisan support for the defense policy bill (Defense Daily, June 12).
As of Defense Daily’s deadline, the House was working through a series of recorded votes related to GOP-proposed measures to enact a hiring for Diversity, Equity and Inclusion-related jobs at DoD, eliminate DEI offices at the department, remove the DoD Chief Diversity Officer position, bring a Confederate monument back to Arlington Cemetery and to ban coverage of gender transition care.
The House narrowly voted 214-207 in favor of an amendment from Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-Texas) that blocks the Pentagon’s policy for reimbursing service members that travel to receive abortion-related services, a measure that Democrats have pointed to as key to blocking their support for the NDAA if included in the bill.
The House Armed Services Committee last month voted 57-1 to advance its $883.7 billion version of the NDAA, which authorizes nearly $895 billion for national defense when factoring in items outside the panel’s jurisdiction and adheres to the one percent spending cap from last year’s debt limit deal (Defense Daily, May 23).