US Senate passes $612 billion defense policy bill

.

View photo

FILE - In this June 16, 2015 file photo, Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John McCain, R-Ariz., listens during a news conference on Capitol Hill in Washington. Over White House objections, the Senate is poised to pass a $612 billion defense policy bill that calls for arming Ukraine forces, prevents another round of base closures and makes it harder for President Barack Obama to close the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay. McCain urged his colleagues Thursday to set aside differences about government spending and pass the measure, which authorizes money Obama requested for the Pentagon and other national security programs. He said that the world is more dangerous than it was in 2011, when the automatic spending cuts kicked in. (AP Photo/Susan Walsh, File)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over White House objections, the U.S. Senate on Thursday passed a $612 billion defense policy bill that calls for arming Ukraine forces, prevents another round of base closures and makes it harder for President Barack Obama to close the prison for terror suspects at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The Senate voted 71-25 to approve the bill, which Obama has threatened to veto.
The bill, which now must be reconciled with the version passed by the House, provides a 2.3 percent pay increase for U.S. servicemen and -women. It also reaffirms a ban against torturing detainees.
Moments after the overwhelming vote to establish military policy, Democrats blocked a separate bill that provides the actual funds for the Pentagon. The vote was 50-45, 10 short of the necessary votes to move ahead in the 100-member chamber.
Democrats oppose the way the bill skirts congressional spending caps by padding an emergency war-fighting account that is exempt from the caps. They argue that if Republicans want to break through spending caps on defense, they should do so for domestic spending, too.

A brief exchange between the Republican and Democratic leaders underscored the broader budget dispute that is likely to stretch through the summer, up until the Sept. 30 deadline to keep the government operating. It also captured the political gamble by Democrats, who blocked Pentagon money and left senators open to Republican criticism that they were failing to support the military.

"You just voted for the troops, now you're going to vote against them?" Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, a Republican, asked with a degree of incredulity.
Minority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat, argued against "doing funny money" on defense and maintained that the Republicans were short-changing the FBI and National Institutes of Health.
"There are some who say this is a one-year fix," said Sen. Jack Reed, the committee's top Democrat, who voted against the massive bill. "I don't think that's the case at all. I think if we use these types of, as some call, gimmicks, accounting tricks once, our tendency to use them again will be there. Once we've used it once, it is easy to use it two, three, four, five times."
Democrats hope to force Republicans to the negotiating table, a strategy that seems risky. It would put Democrats on the hook for delaying troop pay, funds for operations in Afghanistan and combating Islamic extremists, and the rest of the Pentagon budget.
Hours before the vote, top Senate Democrats sent McConnell a letter urging him to convene a mini-summit to find a way to match the Pentagon budget boost with increases for domestic programs such as education, infrastructure grants and law enforcement.
"We write to urge you to immediately schedule bipartisan budget negotiations for next week to find a fair, reasonable and responsible path forward for funding key national priorities such as national defense and domestic investments in education, health, science and infrastructure," the Democrats said in the letter. "We are alarmed that you have not displayed a greater sense of urgency to address this problem."
The White House objects to the bill for what Defense Secretary Ash Carter on Wednesday called "herky jerky" budgeting that ignores a need to allocate money for multiyear weapons development programs, for instance. "I travel around the world and this ... looks terrible," Carter told the House Armed Services Committee. "It gives the appearance that we are diminishing ourselves because we can't come together behind a budget, year in and year out."

The White House also is opposed to provisions that would make it harder for Obama to transfer the remaining 116 detainees out of Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, so he can make good on his pledge to close the military prison. Obama objects to the bill because it does not authorize the closing of unneeded U.S. military facilities, prohibits the retirement of the A-10 aircraft that provides close air support for ground troops and forces the administration to provide lethal assistance to Ukrainian forces fighting Russian-backed separatists — something the White House has so far refrained from doing.

http://news.yahoo.com/us-senate-passes-612-billion-defense-policy-bill-183215734.html