By Emily Jacobs, Congressional Reporter. Media: Washington Examiner
The fate of a supplemental defense spending bill remains in limbo as the House and Senate return from August recess.
The Senate’s recess ended earlier this week, while the House will come back next Tuesday. Both are returning to the threat of a government shutdown and a broader dispute about defense spending levels and Ukraine aid.
The federal government runs out of money on Sept. 30, meaning the House and Senate each have less than 15 in-session days between now and then to find a resolution in order to prevent a shutdown. Further complicating matters, House and Senate appropriators have spent months marking up government funding bills at different spending levels.
On the Senate side, Senate Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray (D-WA) and ranking member Susan Collins (R-ME) have been advancing the 12 annual appropriations bills using spending levels agreed upon as part of President Joe Biden and House Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s (R-CA) deal to avert a debt default in May.
Senators across the ideological spectrum were furious over the defense caps in the deal, which would put the Pentagon out of step with the rate of inflation and harm their overall ability to allocate adequate resources where needed. Facing a potential mutiny from defense hawks threatening to tank the agreement, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) pledged to bring a supplemental defense spending bill up for a vote later in the year.
McCarthy’s mere four-vote majority in the House leaves him with little room for defections within his conference, as evidenced by his caving to demands from hardline conservatives that appropriators write their 12 bills at fiscal 2022 spending levels, below the numbers in the debt limit deal. He has also rejected the notion of the House passing a defense supplemental.
The House speaker told members on a call last month that he expects a short-term continuing resolution will be necessary to give both chambers enough time to pass and negotiate their 12 appropriations bills. Schumer has also expressed support for the idea.
The president and a vast majority of senators are still fully behind passing a defense supplemental that includes Ukraine aid. Those in favor have mused about potential avenues for passing the legislation through the House, including possibly attaching Ukraine aid and disaster relief to a short-term funding bill.
Biden requested $40 billion in emergency supplemental funding, which includes $24 billion in aid to Ukraine, $12 billion in disaster relief, and a couple of billion for border security from Congress last month.
“Both parties, in both chambers, must come together on passing emergency supplemental funding to help our fellow Americans reeling from natural disasters, to stand with our friends in Ukraine fighting against Putin, and to fight against the fentanyl crisis, among other priorities,” Schumer said on the Senate floor on Thursday.
“The Senate’s top priority must be keeping the American people safe,” McConnell said in floor remarks on Wednesday. “And this month we’ll have the chance to do that with supplemental appropriations for urgent national security and disaster relief priorities.”
McCarthy, meanwhile, has expressed interest in only pairing disaster relief to the short-term CR and instead leveraging Ukraine spending for increased federal efforts to beef up border security. While the idea would likely help push the supplemental bill through the House, it would spell doom for the package in the Democrat-controlled Senate.
Sen. Roger Wicker (R-MS), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Washington Examiner that he doesn’t think passing a supplemental package through the House will be “a slam dunk.”
“It’s going to take some finesse, no question about it,” Wicker said Thursday.
Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), who led the potential mutiny to demand a defense supplemental in May, said on Wednesday he could get behind McCarthy’s idea to pair Ukraine aid with funds devoted to border security on the condition that the House speaker doesn’t delay the aid.
“Pulling the plug on Ukraine after Afghanistan is a nightmare for America. And if you don’t get that, you really don’t understand the world as how it actually works,” the South Carolina senator said. “If we pull the plug on Ukraine, there goes Taiwan, the whole world unravels.”
Sen. Dan Sullivan (R-AK) suggested that actually making a decision on what is in the package alongside Ukraine aid “is going to be the key.” The Alaska senator, who serves with Wicker on Armed Services, suggested that the supplemental “include issues that relate to the broader challenges we have with authoritarian aggression, meaning a lot on China and Taiwan.
“There’s all this focus on Ukraine, but the aperture of threats is much bigger than just Ukraine,” he said. “And I think, by the way, you get a lot more votes when it’s that way.”
On the other side of the aisle, Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT), a known Russia hawk, suggested to the Washington Examiner that there be calm on the matter “until we actually get some public statements from House leadership” suggesting a Ukraine package has no path forward.
Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-NY), a fellow Armed Services member, said Thursday that she was “hopeful” the matter would get worked out, noting that: “If it starts bipartisan in the Senate, it means it can also be bipartisan in the House.
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