WASHINGTON (AP) — Senate Democrats sidetracked a $575 billion defense bill for next year late Thursday and threatened to shut down Congress’ work on spending legislation, accusing Republicans of shortchanging domestic programs. The move prompted the leaders of each party to testily accuse the other side of dysfunction.
Both parties support the defense measure itself. But Democrats fear that if it is completed and sent to President Barack Obama, they would lose leverage with the GOP for future spending measures financing health, public works, law enforcement and other domestic programs.
The Senate voted 50-44 to head off a Democratic filibuster of the bill but fell 10 short of the 60 votes needed, effectively stalling the measure.
As Democrats made their intentions clear, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell said they should be renamed “the dysfunction party” and warned that this is a dangerous period to block money for the Pentagon.
“At a time when we face an array of terror threats around the globe, we cannot afford to put politics above support for our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines,” said McConnell, R-Ky.
Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid fired back, saying, “They’re the party of Trump, so don’t call us dysfunctional,” referring to presumptive GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump, whose controversial statements have divided Republicans.
Reid and other top Democrats sent McConnell a letter earlier Thursday, saying Republicans were breaking a budget pact reached last year by not providing comparable funding for defense and domestic programs and inserting controversial provisions into spending legislation. They said Republicans had inserted extra money into defense bills but rejected Democratic efforts to provide additional funds for infrastructure projects, scientific research and to combat the Zika virus.
The Democrats wrote that they would block Senate work on upcoming spending bills “without strong, public assurance that you are committed to honoring the core tenets” of the budget agreement, “including fair funding, parity and a rejection of poison pill” language.
McConnell said the amount of money in the defense bill did comport to last year’s budget pact. He noted that Democrats on the Senate Appropriations Committee had recently joined Republicans in unanimously approving the defense measure.
“There’s no excuse to filibuster this bill,” he said.
Copyright 2016 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Well now, The Turtle does know a bit about dysfunction. He did after all write the book on How to Make the Senate Dysfunctional.
More than half a trillion dollars a year on the military… There’s dysfunction alright but I don’t think either Senator has quite put their finger on the problem. Imagine what even $200 billion a year dropped on our country’s infrastructure could do for the country and the economy.
The idea that if we quit over-spending so much on the military, which causes strife all around the world, we wouldn’t need to spend so much on the military is beyond the ability of the war happy to understand. And willingly so.
IOW, by reducing our footprint around the world and all of the aggression in the middle east alone we would quit irritating others and then the reduction would be at least two-fold. We’d be smaller by reducing obviously but then could scale back even more because there wouldn’t be the constant flare-ups due to our occupations.
If we weren’t in Ben Ghazi, there wouldn’t have been a Ben Ghazi.
Hell, just the savings on the stupid Republican investigations about the war that they started would be worthwhile. No Iraq-No Ben Ghazi.
Judge Garland says Hello.
Karma.