Happy Thursday! House Republicans today passed a number of controversial amendments to the National Defense Authorization Act, complicating the path to passing the annual defense bill.
Before we dive into the details of that serious story, you may be interested to know that National French Fry Day will be celebrated both today and tomorrow due to some calendar confusion. Now on to the news.
Republicans Pass Abortion Amendment, Threatening Annual Defense Policy Bill
House Republicans on Thursday passed a controversial amendment to the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act that would prohibit the Pentagon from covering expenses for service members who travel to receive abortion-related services.
The amendment is one of several controversial changes approved by Republicans. It threatens to eliminate support for the bill among Democrats and moderate Republicans and raises serious questions about the ability of the House to eventually reconcile its version of the must-pass legislation with one to come from the Democratic-controlled Senate.
Thursday’s votes come after the House Rules Committee on Wednesday approved roughly 300 relatively non-controversial amendments for consideration on the floor, out of a total of more than 1,500 that had been offered. In a late-night meeting that stretched into the early hours of Thursday morning, the committee then agreed to allow votes on 80 additional amendments that touch on hot-button issues including abortion funding, diversity training, climate change, Ukraine war funding and keeping Confederate names on military bases.
The agreement to allow votes on the controversial amendments emerged following a push by right-wing Republicans, many affiliated with the Freedom Caucus, to include a whole host of culture-war issues in the defense authorization bill, which they threatened to scuttle if their demands were not met.
Making it hard to meet in the middle: Democrats say that some of the amendments — and the abortion one in particular — will undermine their support for the bill, which has passed on a bipartisan basis for 62 years in a row. Rep. Jim McGovern, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, complained that it is “outrageous that a small minority of MAGA extremists is dictating how we’ll proceed.”
Rep. Katherine Clark, the Democratic whip, warned that if funding for Pentagon’s abortion policy is revoked, Democrats will refuse to support the bill. “What we’re seeing now, the GOP once again choosing extremism, making abortion and women’s health care and freedom in this country the issue that they put over our national security,” she told CNN. “So we’ll see how this plays out and what amendments are taken up but I don’t see Democrats supporting an NDAA with that in it.”
Prior to the vote, Democratic Caucus Chair Pete Aguilar also said that the amendments could make it very difficult to win bipartisan support. “There’s a number of poison pill policy riders that would be deeply troubling to the House Democratic Caucus,” he said. “I think one deeply problematic [rider] for the House Democratic Caucus would be the Tommy Tuberville-type of language restricting women from receiving leave in order to receive healthcare,” he added, referring to the Alabama senator who is holding up hundreds of promotions at the Pentagon in protest of the department’s abortion policy. “That one is deeply problematic, and if it was included, I think it would be as close to a red line as I think we're willing to discuss.”
Even some Republicans are pushing back against the hardliners’ approach. “If we want to fight out social policies, have cultural wars, they should be done outside the NDAA,” Rep. Nick LaLota, a Republican from Long Island, told CNN’s Manu Raju.
Republicans press ahead: Still, dozens of hardline Republicans are highly motivated to push their border cultural agenda through the defense bill. Rep. Ronny Jackson, the Texas Republican who served as White House physician to former president Donald Trump, made it clear that he intends to stand by his now-successful amendment on abortion policy.
"President Biden and [Defense] Secretary Austin are knowingly breaking the law with their illegal policy of using taxpayer dollars to fund and provide access to abortions in the military," he told the Washington Examiner. "The Biden administration is jeopardizing our military’s readiness by forcing this illegal abortion policy down the throats of the American people. Congressman Chip Roy and I are proud to work alongside Senator Tuberville in our efforts to hold the Department of Defense accountable and end this illegal policy.”
So far, the hardliners have been pleased with the results of their efforts. “This is not a Paul Ryan Republican majority,” Rep. Clay Higgins, an extreme hardliner from Louisiana, said. “Leadership has done an excellent job here. And the Rules Committee guys have busted their ass getting this thing into a package where the most conservative of us can say, 'Wow, this is a legitimate, good-faith effort.'”
At the same time, Higgins said he would vote against the defense bill if it doesn’t include the amendments he wants, which touch on abortion, gender-affirming medical care and Ukraine aid.
The bottom line: As we saw during the negotiations over raising the debt limit, far-right Republicans are demanding to have their way, even if their efforts threaten to derail must-pass legislation — as the Pentagon abortion policy amendment certainly does. The fight over the NDAA may just be a prelude to an even more complicated clash over annual spending bills.
House Lawmakers Announce Bipartisan Group Focused on the Debt
Fiscal hawks in the House of Representatives have a new BFF.
A group of lawmakers led by Democratic Rep. Scott Peters of California and Republican Rep. Bill Huizenga of Michigan have formed the “Bipartisan Fiscal Forum” — BFF, for short — which they say is dedicated to “sounding the alarm about our nation’s unsustainable debt trajectory and working together to get control of our fiscal future.”
The lawmakers say that the group began informally back in 2020 and will now try to elevate the issues of the debt and the broken budget process with fellow lawmakers and the public. They argue that addressing those issues requires bipartisanship. “We owe it to our children to acknowledge our country's unsustainable fiscal trajectory and work together, across the aisle, to address it over time,” Peters said in a statement. And Huizenga tweeted: “It's time for Washington to wake up to the threat our national debt poses and the true cost of financing such a massive burden.”
As part of that approach, the group sent a letter to House Speaker Kevin McCarthy and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries calling for the creation of a fiscal commission. “Our nation faces debt levels and interest costs that threaten our economy, and we must act as soon as possible, and we must do so collaboratively,” the letter says. “If designed and executed properly, a commission has the potential to make significant strides toward fiscal sustainability.”
The steering committee for the group includes Republicans Tim Burchett of Tennessee, Ron Estes of Kansas, Bill Johnson of Ohio and Blake Moore of Utah as well as Democrats Ed Case of Hawaii, Jared Golden of Maine, Chrissy Houlahan of Pennsylvania and Jimmy Panetta of California. The group did not release a full list of members but said that “more than 70 current members of Congress have participated in BFF activities.”
Numbers of the Day
$1.4 trillion: The U.S. deficit for the first nine months of fiscal year 2023 totaled $1.39 trillion, including $228 billion in June, according to the latest monthly report from the Treasury Department. The nine-month total is slightly greater than the $1.375 trillion deficit for all of fiscal year 2022, and the deficit over the past 12 months comes to nearly $2.3 trillion. The Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a nonpartisan non-profit that advocates for deficit reduction, notes that, at this rate, interest on the debt will be the largest line item in the federal budget by 2051 – larger than the two biggest current programs, Social Security and Medicare.
$8,000: The maximum annual pay increase that members of Congress would get next year under a spending bill recently approved by the House Appropriations Committee. The raise, a cost-of-living increase of 4.6% from the current annual salary of $174,000, would be the first for lawmakers in nearly 15 years — but whether it will actually happen is still a matter of debate among members of Congress, with some concerned about the optics of granting themselves higher pay, according to Roll Call’s Aidan Quigley. The potential raise, Quigley notes, “comes as House Republicans pursue cuts to most federal agencies and programs, sparing only defense, veterans and border security.”
Send your feedback to yrosenberg@thefiscaltimes.com. And please encourage your friends to sign up here for their own copy of this newsletter.
Fiscal News Roundup
- House Votes to Limit Abortion Access in the Military, Bowing to the Right – New York Times
- Defense Bill's Passage Threatened by Abortion Amendment, Limits on Ukraine Funding – CBS News
- House GOP Leaders Furiously Whip Defense Bill as Passage Remains Shaky Despite Concessions – CNN
- Five Controversial Amendments Complicating McCarthy's Job of Passing the NDAA – Washington Examiner
- Republicans Join Democrats in Advancing Funding Bills Out of Senate Panel – The Hill
- June Wholesale Prices Rise Less Than Expected in Another Encouraging Inflation Report – CNBC
- With Inflation Down, Democrats Are Starting to Brag About the Economy – Semafor
- Chamber of Commerce Files Motion for Preliminary Injunction on Medicare Drug Negotiation – The Hill
- House GOP Anti-Spending Fervor May Not Apply to Member Pay Raise – Roll Call
- ‘Stop Demonizing Government,’ 20-Year Veteran Senate Chaplain Urges – Roll Call
- A Bipartisan Group in the House Called the BFF Wants Their Colleagues Thinking About the Future of US Debt – Politico
- A Red State Boosted Public Health Funding by 1,500 Percent. This Is How They Did It – Politico
- Fed’s Bullard, Influential Voice on Rates, to Leave for Academia – Bloomberg
- How Canada Figured Out a Carbon Tax and Gave the Money Back – Bloomberg (podcast)
- U.S. to Pay Nearly $1M to Settle Sexual Assault Case Against Former Top General – Politico
- FDA Approves First Over-the-Counter Birth Control Pill in U.S. – Washington Post
Views and Analysis
- Far-Right Republicans’ Radical, Bigoted Attack on the Defense Bill – Robert Schlesinger, New Republic
- Biden’s Economic Dream Is Becoming Reality — but How Long Can He Sustain It? – Adam Cancryn, Politico
- Biden’s Democratic Party Is to the Left of Obama’s. Thank a Progressive – Perry Bacon Jr., Washington Post
- Everything’s Coming Up Soft Landing – Paul Krugman, New York Times
- America’s Student Loans Were Never Going to Be Repaid – Laura Beamer and Marshall Steinbaum, New York Times
- The Company Salivating Over The Medicaid Disaster – Matthew Cunningham-Cook, The Lever
- Social Security Won’t Run Out, but Your Check Might Not Be What You’re Expecting. Here’s Why – Emily Lorsch, CNBC
- How the Child Tax Credit Became a Partisan Issue – Grace Segers, New Republic
- Washington’s Defense Spending Habit Is a Cluster Bomb of Strategic Risk – John T. Bennett, Roll Call
- A Global Subsidy War? Keeping up With the Americans – Guy Chazan, Sam Fleming and Kana Inagaki, Financial Times
- The House Is Sprinting to Reauthorize Addiction Services – Rachel Roubein, Washington Post
- The US Public Health Workforce Is 80,000 People Short. Here’s How to Fix That – Riley Griffin, Bloomberg
- Reinventing the E.R. for America’s Mental-Health Crisis – Dhruv Khullar, The New Yorker
- Yes, a Recession Is Still a Possibility – Allison Schrager, Bloomberg