Massive defense bill

Obama vetoes massive defense bill over budget spat

By AUSTIN WRIGHT and JEREMY HERB

President Barack Obama issued the fifth veto of his seven-year presidency on Thursday, rejecting the sweeping $612 billion National Defense Authorization Act in a move designed to prevent Republicans from getting an edge in nascent budget negotiations.

The expected veto of the defense policy bill — approved with wide, bipartisan support in both the House and Senate — shows a new level of resolve from a president who’s threatened in years past to veto the annual measure but had never followed through.

The president’s action, before a small group of journalists summoned to the Oval Office, also disregards the warnings of Democratic defense hawks who backed the measure. And it demonstrates yet again that the president, emboldened in his second term, has few qualms about taking steps sure to provoke congressional Republicans — like his executive orders on immigration or his moves to limit the ability of Congress to stop his nuclear deal with Iran.

Obama’s objection to the bill is tied up in a larger battle with Republicans over federal spending. He wants to lift spending caps for both the Pentagon and other federal agencies — while Republicans are pushing a budget plan that would only lift the caps for the Pentagon. And the defense authorization bill adheres to the GOP budget plan, using the supplemental Overseas Contingency Operations war fund to allow the military to get around the caps.

But Republican congressional leaders view the defense authorization bill as one of the few bipartisan achievements of the current Congress, heralding it for what they consider long-overdue reforms to the military’s acquisition bureaucracy and retirement system. And they’re plotting their payback: a massive public-relations campaign designed to portray the president as indifferent to the sacrifices of service members, willing to reject a bill that authorizes their pay and benefits during a time of war.

"I recognize the president wants to make a point about spending, but there are ways to do that that don't put our troops in the middle," House Speaker John Boehner of Ohio said Tuesday as he and other GOP leaders signed the final version of the bill and sent it to the White House. Boehner was flanked by more than a half-dozen rank-and-file Republicans, along with the bill’s chief sponsors: House and Senate Armed Services Chairmen Mac Thornberry of Texas and John McCain of Arizona.

In a joint statement on Thursday, Thornberry and McCain blasted Obama’s veto as “reckless, cynical and downright dangerous.”

“Never before has an American president used the bill that provides pay and support to our troops and their families as political leverage for his domestic agenda,” they said. “The American people, and most importantly, the men and women in uniform deployed to fight in dangerous war zones around the world, expect more from their commander-in-chief.”

The bill now heads back to the House, where Republican leaders have already scheduled a vote Nov. 5 to override the veto. The final compromise version of the legislation passed the House earlier this month, 270-156, short of the two-thirds majority required for an override.

There’s speculation, however, that GOP leaders will lean on the 10 Republicans who voted against the bill in an effort to flip their votes and get more support for an override. And Thornberry acknowledged Tuesday he was seeking to flip members in both parties who voted against the bill the last time around. “We were 12 votes short of the two-thirds when it came up before,” he said.

The Senate voted 70-27 to approve the compromise, with enough Democratic support to overturn a veto. But Senate Democratic leaders have said those Democratic votes might not be there if Senate Republicans try for an override.

For weeks, the White House has telegraphed the president’s plan to reject the bill, with press secretary Josh Earnest emphasizing Obama’s objection to the fact that the measure endorses this year’s GOP budget plan.

The budget blueprint seeks to use the supplemental Overseas Contingency Operations war fund to allow the Pentagon to get around the strict caps on federal spending put in place by the Budget Control Act of 2011, while leaving other federal agencies subject to the caps.

Democrats have dismissed the GOP budget for bolstering the Pentagon at the expense of the rest of the government and are pressing for a deal that would increase the caps on all discretionary spending — the Pentagon along with domestic federal agencies.

But a number of hawkish Democrats voted for the bill, especially those with a major military presence in their states and districts — and the president won’t be able to count on all of them to help him sustain the veto. Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, for instance, said Tuesday that he’d vote to override the president.

“I’m going to vote consistently with how I’ve been voting,” he said. “From a policy standpoint, it’s as good an NDAA as we’ve had in recent years.”

The defense authorization act is one of the few “must-pass” bills remaining in Congress, having been signed into law each of the past 53 years. The measure, which sets policies for every aspect of the military, is now held up in the larger budget standoff over how to fund the government after the current continuing spending resolution expires on Dec. 11.

If a budget deal is reached before then, the defense authorization measure would likely be revised to match the deal’s spending levels and then sent back to the president. If no deal is reached, the bill’s fate is unclear, although lawmakers could send the president a bare-bones version focusing on policy provisions.

Previous versions of the annual defense bill have faced threats, most recently over the indefinite detention of suspected terrorists and the repeal in 2010 of the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy that banned gays from serving openly in the military.
Defense authorization measures have been vetoed four times, but each time Congress quickly returned them to the president after the offending provision was removed.

This time, there’s no single offending provision but rather an entire funding scheme that’s baked into the way the measure is structured.

“There is no adjustment we can make in the defense authorization bill that meets the objections of the president,” Thornberry warned.

The bill includes a host of new reforms and provisions.ama-vetoes-defense-bill-215074#ixzz3pKeYdgut