Much of the news from Capitol Hill this year has been about what isn’t getting done, highlighted by the internal divisions among Republicans that led to the historic ouster of a U.S. House Speaker.
In pure legislative terms, this year was a bust. Government funding for 2024 isn’t close to being finished. Lawmakers delayed a rewrite of farm support laws. Military aid for Israel and Ukraine remains sidetracked by a separate dispute over border security.
But there was one bill that rose above the partisanship in Congress, as lawmakers easily approved a major military policy bill – what’s known as the National Defense Authorization Act — for a 63rd consecutive year.
“I will always support our national security and common defense,” said U.S. Rep. David Scott, D-Atlanta, as the overwhelming bipartisan majorities voting in favor of the Pentagon plan were a welcome change on Capitol Hill.
At first, the defense bill was in partisan limbo, after House Republicans loaded it up with conservative social policy provisions that had no future in the Senate. But Congressional negotiators dropped many of those in the final compromise.
“This bill reflects the consensus of an overwhelming majority of Democrats and Republicans,” said U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop, D-Albany.
The opposition to the plan combined the wings of both parties. Republicans such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Rome, who felt the defense bill wasn’t conservative enough, voted ‘No,’ as did more liberal Democrats including U.S. Rep. Nikema Williams, D-Atlanta, who opposed higher spending levels set out for the military.
While the defense bill is a blueprint for how lawmakers could operate — by setting a policy course down the middle — maybe the more logical question is how long the military can sidestep the siren song of partisanship in Congress.
Just look at the 10-month blockade by Sen. Tommy Tuberville, R-Ala., who stopped hundreds of senior military promotions this year.
Three years ago, President Donald Trump vetoed the defense bill — in part because of his opposition to Pentagon plans to rename military installations named after Confederate soldiers. Congress easily overrode that veto.
But this year, Greene and U.S. Rep. Andrew Clyde, R-Athens, repeatedly tried to reverse the name changes; at one point, 177 House Republicans voted to go back to the original Confederate base names — using ‘Fort Benning’ instead of the new moniker of ‘Fort Moore’ in Georgia, for example. But their efforts failed.
For now, defense remains a last bastion of bipartisan cooperation in Congress. We’ll see if that continues for the 64th straight year in 2024.
Jamie Dupree has covered national politics and Congress from Washington, D.C. since the Reagan administration. His column appears weekly in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. For more, check out his Capitol Hill newsletter at http://jamiedupree.substack.com
