House-Senate talks on Defense policy bill collapse
Authorization measure might fail to pass for the first time in more than 40 years.
Members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees have suspended unofficial talks aimed at hammering out a compromise fiscal 2011 defense authorization bill -- an unusually bitter breakdown that raises the odds the annual Pentagon policy bill will fail to pass Congress for the first time in more than 40 years.
"Effective immediately, we will cease negotiations with the Senate on the NDAA [National Defense Authorization Act]," the House Armed Services Committee staff director wrote in an e-mail Monday afternoon to the members and aides with the House panel.
Democratic aides said that House Armed Services Republicans abandoned the talks Monday. Republicans countered that Democrats politicized the bill by including a repeal of the "don't ask, don't tell" policy barring gays from the military, and went further when Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., tried to add language giving some illegal immigrants who came to the United States as children a path to citizenship -- a move Republicans called an attempt to win Latin-American votes for his reelection campaign.
"Republicans dropped out because they want it to look like Democrats are ineffective," replied a Democratic aide. This aide said the walkout by Republicans represented an unprecedented level of partisanship in talks on the bill that usually passes with overwhelming bipartisan margins.
Meanwhile, Republicans are worried that Congress will not have enough time during the lame-duck session to review the Pentagon's report -- which is due Dec. 1 -- on how best to implement a repeal of "don't ask, don't tell," a GOP aide said. Republicans believe lawmakers should not act until they have time to ask questions and understand the implications of the repeal, the aide explained.
"Rushing a repeal through at the end of a congressional session is not the way Americans want their government to function," the aide said.
But both sides agreed that political considerations have made the bill harder to move than ever. The measure has passed every year since the 1960s, giving the Armed Services Committees tremendous influence in directing Pentagon spending and policy.
Due to the limited time available in the lame-duck session, Democrats and Republicans on the House and Senate armed services committees were negotiating to settle as many issues as possible ahead of the session to help speed a conference bill through both chambers relatively quickly. A proposal to move a stripped-down authorization bill, without the repeal of the gay ban and other provisions was one option discussed.
To improve the chances of passing the bill, House Armed Services Seapower Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Gene Taylor, D-Miss., said in an interview Tuesday that he has asked Armed Services Chairman Rep. Ike Skelton, D-Mo., to contact House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., and ask her to let the committee's version of the bill go to conference rather than the bill the full House passed in May.
Unlike the bill passed by the House, the committee version of the measure does not contain language repealing the "don't ask, don't tell" ban against openly gay men and women serving in the miltary. Skelton and Taylor, who both lost reelection last week, opposed the repeal of the 1993 law.
Taylor said he wants to negotiate the committee-passed bill in order to get the must-pass legislation through Congress by the end of the year.
"If you know that something is not going to happen, then I'm of the school of thought that doing something is much better than doing nothing," Taylor said.