Hard-right House Republicans are pushing to use the annual bill that sets the United States’ military budget and policies as an opportunity to pick a fight with the Biden administration over abortion, race and transgender issues, blocking its passage and the decades-old bipartisan consensus is jeopardized. Congress on aid to the Pentagon.
Republican leaders have scheduled votes on the $886 billion measure as of Wednesday, but as of Tuesday evening they have yet to stop their ultraconservative colleagues from loading it with politically charged provisions to combat what the GOP calls “waking up the military.”
Those proposals — including reversing a Pentagon policy that allows military access to abortions and defunding the military’s diversity, equity, and inclusion programs — would alienate moderate Republicans and Democrats whose votes would be needed to bill through the narrowly divided House.
The situation has turned the annual defense policy bill into the latest test of Chairman Kevin McCarthy’s leadership since the far right rebelled against the debt ceiling deal he struck with President Biden, stalling the House to exert more leverage over to demand his agenda. Right-wing lawmakers have threatened to do it again if their priorities are not met, and this time their tactics could entangle what is widely seen as one of the few bills that must be passed by Congress each year, and which normally garner widespread support. get around the world. the political spectrum.
This year’s bill would grant a 5.2 percent increase to military personnel, counter aggressive actions by China and Russia, and create a special inspector general to oversee U.S. aid to Ukraine. But the legislation has increasingly become a magnet for cultural battles in recent years, and with Republicans controlling the House, right-wing members have tried to exploit it to further their socially conservative agenda.
It is a key part of the Republican Party’s attack on Mr Biden and the Democrats, whom they accuse of trying to push radical liberal policies into all aspects of American life. The Pentagon figures prominently in their narrative, as it allows Republicans to link their complaints about cultural issues to national security and patriotism, effectively arguing that progressive policies are not only misleading but also dangerous.
“I believe it is vital and fundamental to defense that we stop making the Department of Defense a social engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform,” Texas Republican Rep. Chip Roy said in an interview.
Mr Roy said he eschewed ultimatums but would “expect” votes on reversing the Pentagon’s policy on abortion and diversity, indicating he would otherwise not be in favor of raising the bill .
Conservatives have also proposed several provisions aimed at transgender troops, including one that would deny coverage for transitional services and another that would force them to use facilities that matched their sex at birth.
Republicans have already included some provisions in the bill that appear to be designed to fuel debates about culture wars. At an editorial session last month on the House Armed Services Committee, GOP lawmakers added a ban on drag shows at military bases and instructions on critical race theory.
But leaders in the party fear the Conservatives’ demands for even more social policy dictates could break the bipartisan coalition they’ve built around the bill, which was passed almost unanimously by the Armed Forces panel.
“We had a full, healthy debate, a series of debates,” Rep. Mike D. Rogers, the chairman of the Armed Forces panel, said Tuesday at a Rules Committee hearing, referring to the editorial session last month. “Several amendments have been passed to address this.”
Mr. McCarthy’s slim majority means he can afford to lose no more than four Republicans on any ballot, giving factions of his party excessive clout to make demands. Last month, 11 far-right Republicans, including Mr. Roy, managed to bring the House of Representatives to a halt by withholding their votes for a rule that regulates the legislative debate in protest of the debt ceiling deal.
It was not clear whether those legislators or others would do the same with the basic defense law rules, which would prevent it from being considered.
“I’m voting for the rule and I’m voting for the bill,” Florida Republican Representative Matt Gaetz said in an interview, after promising that conservative Republicans would force votes to “reverse the course of radical gender ideology.” DOD “Mr. Gaetz was one of several lawmakers who protested the debt ceiling agreement by blocking other actions on the House floor.
Republicans are unlikely to get any help from Democrats to bring the defense bill to the table if the measure meets conservative demands, and they could lose the critical Democratic support needed to pass the bill if the Republicans vote as a bloc to reverse the Pentagon’s policies. race, gender and abortion. In any case, passing the bill down the party line would be virtually unheard of on Capitol Hill, indicating the erosion of a rare pillar of bipartisanship in Congress.
Democrats argued that rolling back diversity initiatives at the Pentagon would jeopardize the military’s future.
“A diverse force is critical,” Washington Representative Adam Smith, the top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told the Rules Committee on Tuesday, imploring lawmakers not to allow a vote on the proposal. “We have recruitment challenges. We cannot exclude large groups of people from that process. This is about national security. This is not about a leftist political agenda.”
They also expressed no confidence that House Republican leaders would succeed in getting the conservatives to straighten out.
“It seems like the Freedom Caucus is telling them that ‘we can’t make progress unless we get our way on some of these divisive issues,'” Massachusetts Representative Jim McGovern, the chief Democrat on the Rules Committee, said in a statement. interview on Tuesday. “And if history is any indicator, when the Freedom Caucus says, ‘Jump,’ Kevin McCarthy responds by saying, ‘How high?’”
Should Republicans succeed in getting the bill to the ground, mainstream Republicans could help defeat some of the conservative social policy proposals.
Representatives Don Bacon of Nebraska and Michael R. Turner of Ohio, both Republicans, declined last month to support a proposal to cut funding to the Pentagon’s diversity, justice and inclusion programs.
“Saying you’re going to scrap diversity training completely makes no sense,” Bacon said in an interview, referring to his own diversity training in the Air Force. “You have to have policies on diversity and racism and sexism.”
Conservative lawmakers may face similar hurdles in persuading Republican moderates to overturn a Pentagon policy that provides time off and travel compensation to service members who travel out of state to obtain an abortion or related services, an effort to to equalize access after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
More than 50 House Republicans have signed amendments to change the Pentagon’s abortion policy. But a handful were outspoken in their criticism of the GOP for trying to push through ruthless policies.
“As a Republican, I want to make sure that we show compassion to women and that we don’t drop the ball this week,” South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace said in an interview when asked about her party’s push to pass it. Pentagon policy on access to abortion. “That’s my concern as it stands now.”
