On Wednesday, Democrats and Republicans decided that they could stop pretending to care about deficits and pass a bunch of corporate tax breaks.(8 of the 9 representatives from MA joined, the exception being Mike Capuano who was not in attendance this past week because of his wife’s illness.)
Then on Thursday, they showed us yet again that no one cares about the deficit except when it can be used as a rhetorical tool to cut social welfare spending and passed the deficit-increasing $585 billion National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA).
The FY 2015 NDAA is filled with wonders of bipartisan legislating: prohibitions on ending unnecessary weapons programs, a maintenance of existing prohibitions on releasing/transferring those imprisoned by the US at the Guantanamo Bay Detention Facility, more military aid for Ukraine, more military aid for the Syrian rebels, even more military aid for Israel than Obama asked for, requirements to keep nuclear weapons in “warm” status so that they can potentially be used, $63.7 billion for the Pentagon slush fund, and the sale of sacred Native American lands to a foreign mining company.
Wait, there’s a sale of sacred Native American lands in the NDAA?
The defense authorization act…also included a deal to give an Australian-English mining firm 2,400 acres of federal land in Arizona that includes sites sacred to the Apache and Yavapai tribes.The firm, Rio Tinto, owns a uranium mine in Africa in which Iran owns a 15 percent stake. A bill that backers could not get through Congress was added to the must-pass NDAA negotiations between Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) and Rep. Buck McKeon (R-Calif.), who both will soon retire from the Armed Services Committee chairmanships. It gives Rio Tinto, through a subsidiary called Resolution Copper, ownership of vast acreage in the Tonto National Forest to mine copper. Many believe that copper will be shipped to China, which owns 10 percent of Rio Tinto.
But don’t worry: there’s still no authorization for the US’s bombing campaign against ISIS. Money for it? Sure. But an AUMF would require debate and, well, there’s just never time.
The NDAA passed with a comfortable margin of 300 to 119.
194 Republicans and 106 Democrats voted for it. 32 Republicans and 87 Democrats voted against it.
How did our representatives from here in Massachusetts vote?
Niki Tsongas (MA-03) and Stephen Lynch (MA-08) both voted YES.
Richard Neal (MA-01), Jim McGovern (MA-02), Joe Kennedy (MA-04), Katherine Clark (MA-05), and Bill Keating (MA-09) all voted NO.
If you were to actually look for the NDAA on the House Clerk’s website, you might have trouble at first. Then you will realize that it was attached as an amendment to the Protecting Volunteer Firefighters and Emergency Responders Act of 2014, which passed unanimously earlier this year. Don’t you love Congress?
(Adapted from an original post on the Daily Kos)
I wish there were a way to prohibit non-germane amendments to legislation. I also think a better gauge of a Representative’s feelings on the specifics is how he or she voted on the amendment. I would certainly not assume on a catch-all bill such as this that voting for the bill means liking everything contained therein.
I think that was one of the hopes for change in the way business was done in Washington when Barack was elected. If he had spent his political capital in the first two years when Dems controlled both House and Senate it could have had a lasting effect. People would have remembered him as a President who changed the process and didn’t succumb to it.
I would have liked him to send Biden to the Senate to fulfill his constitutional role, make the necessary procedural rulings, and let those who object have their tantrums in full view of CSPAN2. However, the President is not Prime Minister and cannot control the nuances of legislative process.
It means saying to the American public “the Republicans are deliberately giving me powers I don’t want to arrest and detain Americans-that’s unacceptable. I will veto this and sign a clean bill that won’t hold our troops hostage to score political points with the Tea party”, President vetoes and then the issue gets front and center in the media and you can rally your side of Congress and the grassroots. Make them override so the blood is on their hands.
Instead Obama and folks like Tsongas and Lynch throw up their hands and bend over
Deval refused to use it on the watered down revenue package that ended up on his desk, Obama hates using it, and Clinton infamously refused to veto DOMA. All three were fearful that the failure to advance marginal legislation would lead to something worse. Bush knew when to use the veto to make a profound point, to rally his base and identify who the enemy was. We could stand to see more vetos in the next two years, ones that draw some lines in the stand.
…I think Clinton’s signing of DOMA actually reflected his views at the time, though like so many other Americans he has since come around.
…doesn’t this have to be signed just as much as it has to pass? Otherwise isn’t the Pentagon without a budget? Dem Presidents can get away with blaming the GOP for general shutdowns because the GOP already has the reputation of being against many things government provides, but Dems are the ones I think who risk getting painted anti-military in a way that would work politically.
Let the funding collapse and blame the GOP. At the height of the gay marriage controversy, if a Democratic Congress handed an NDAA with a DADT repeal added as a rider, wouldn’t Bush have painted us un patriotic and playing politics with our boys in uniform? That’s my point-the Republicans are always ready to govern as conservatives in or out of power and that kind of opposition has proven itself difficult to overcome whether progressives are in power or not. I is because they recognize the power of symbols, framing, and using the bully pulpit to stand up for your principles.
…given the general impression, fair or not, that Dems are already the anti-defense party I’m not sure blaming the GOP would work for us politically.
Obama killed Osama, got Qadaffi, is fighting ISIL in two different theaters, has drones hundreds, gave Israel no strings attached missile defense and aid, and has done nothing to close Gitmo or scale back the post-9/11 security state-he has repeatedly expanded it.
How often does the GOP call him strong on defense? Or the media? The black radical liberal Democrat will always be called that-so he might as well live up to the freakin part already!
Your logic is the same kind of bullshit that led our party to back the Iraq War. Let’s embrace being doves-the American people certainly are. And if being “weak on defense” means cutting back on the bloated Pentagon than praise The Lord and pass the ammunition savings onto schools already!
I’m not as dovish as you necessarily, but this is different than going along with a war just because. I’d love to fund the Pentagon adequately without the bloating or the amendments, but really I don’t see how this one works for us the way shutting down the human services side of government does.
That the Democrats are ways going to have a perception problem with the military. But I am saying-Fox News and the right will say he hates the troops no matter what he does or what our party votes on or supports and the price tag of a dirty bill has been incredibly high in terms of the liberties we lose and the policies we are pursuing abroad. Let the cuts come and let them hurt and blame them on the GOP. If we are going to get blamed for hating the troops either way-and I have Republican friends who insist as a matter of signs that Obama gutted the budget even as he tripled it from Bush era levels-then let’s just say fuck it and become the dovish party.
A) it’s the right thing to do
B) it’s the popular thing to do
And phrasing it like that “do you want the GOP to hold our troops hostage to their scheme to radically rewrite the Constitution?” is the way to win the battle. Or we lose the battle, and the Pentagon takes a big budget hit which is also a policy victory. This is how to think tactically like the right in the era of zero sum partisanship.
They hold the government hostage and get rewarded with cuts to the programs they didn’t like anyway that they can blame on the President-why can’t we play the same game?
If you want to lose a war, speaking just as a matter of recent history, let the Republicans manage it.
We have eliminated bin Laden and Saddam, so judging by those stated objectives I think we succeeded.
in utter chaos. Heck of a job, Brownie.
I don’t recall George W. Bush authorizing a surge in Afghanistan, or authorizing an international robot death squad to kill thousands of people abroad. I don’t recall George W. Bush authorizing the deaths of American citizens. I don’t recall him expanding extrajudicial killings abroad in a matter that deliberately targets high civilian areas and also deliberately considers any male over 16 in the area a combatant to artificially deflate civilian casualties. We have largely continued Cheney’s torture program at the CIA, as we will find out this week, including extraordinary renditions of suspects abroad. If a conservative Republican authorized the drone program we would be protesting it in the streets and talking impeachment. Certainly at Kos and probably at this site.
It’s time for us to take the partisan blinders off too. Unlike Obama, Bush occasionally talked about Palestinian statehood, and actually invested political capital in a two state solution. Unlike Obama, Bush never armed an Islamist insurgency that immediately turned it’s guns against us. All modern Presidents have repeated the very foreign policy mistakes that created Al Qaeda in the first place. Our Middle Eastern foreign policy has been a bipartisan failure for about three decades now. And name calling one party or the other simply absolves either of the massive amounts of responsibility we collectively share for this costly failure.
How can you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake? A question the left has failed to ask Obama, while thousands of people have died for that mistake since January 2009.