National defense vs. culture war

And what happens next

We just passed the big, annual defense bill out of the House - and at the last minute it became a total cluster.

Over 1,000 amendments were filed by members trying to add things to the bill right before the vote.

Until then, the bill didn’t have much culture war stuff in it - because it had been deliberately kept out.

I’m on the Armed Services Committee and we basically exist to write the annual defense bill. We spend months working on it, then we have a big vote in committee. That big committee vote happened a few weeks ago.

I told you about it. This was when I had a conversation in the breakroom (the one with all the snacks) with the right-flank member who was genuinely sad that committee leadership was blocking all the culture war amendments. He told me leadership wanted the bill to actually become law and not just be dead-on-arrival in the Senate.

But once it left committee, we knew it would face another torrent of amendments from the whole House.

It wound up being worse than I thought. Amendments rained down from the right-flank hitting every corner of the culture war: abortion, race, gender, sexual orientation, environment - the works.

Which meant the Speaker faced a choice: He could let those amendments in, or block them.

If he let them in, his right-flank would be happy, but it would tank the bill in the Senate.

If he blocked them, his right-flank would be angry, but the bill could actually become law.

And… he let a bunch of the amendments in, so now the whole bill is dead-on-arrival in the Senate.

Why didn’t he block them like committee leadership did?

In short, because the right-flank has more leverage over the Speaker than they do over committee chairs. They can’t fire a committee chair - but they sure can fire the Speaker. 

So now what happens?

Now we’ll go through weeks of song and dance until eventually the Speaker goes back to his right-flank and tells them some version of, “Hey folks, you know I tried, we fought the good fight, but… we’re going to have to take most of those amendments out or the troops won’t get paid. So that’s what’s gonna happen.”

Which, in private, I don’t think will bother the right-flank that much. When their amendments come out, they’ll get to go on TV and yell at the Speaker - and that’s one of their favorite things to do. One of the big themes I’ve observed in my time here is that media attention means much more to them than policy wins, and they’ll happily trade one for the other.

My amendments

I didn’t offer any amendments on the House floor, but I did offer some when the bill went through committee. I also got language included in the base text while we were drafting the bill. That’s one of the big advantages of serving on the committee of origin for a bill - you have a much better shot at getting some amendments passed and requests included, especially as a freshman.

Here are some of mine that passed:

• A big one was building on one of my amendments from last year, when we were able to expand parental leave for folks in the National Guard and Reserve to include fathers and adoptive parents. For some reason, they had never been included, which meant they were never entitled to take leave upon the birth or adoption of a child. (I’m a dad in the National Guard so I happen to know about this.) BUT when we fixed that last year, we couldn’t get the Coast Guard Reserve included. We took that loss, but then went back to work to get it in this year’s defense bill - and we did. Major credit goes to my staff on this one. They were extremely diligent because they knew we had a real chance to make a difference for a lot of young families. Their motivation got this one across the finish line.

• Added language in the bill making sure that the thousands of students who receive their education at military installations as children of servicemembers continue to benefit from favorable teacher/student ratios, which was a benefit that was going to sunset. We worked with a member of the other party - Rep. Don Bacon - who has a well-earned reputation for bipartisanship. I can personally assure all of you that it was extremely helpful to have the support of a more senior member in getting this done.

• Added language to improve the processing of sexual assault kits by military medical facilities.

• An amendment to analyze new potential threats posed by biological weapons now that A.I. can be used to help engineer them.

• Added language to push the Defense Department to expedite certification of licensure for military medics upon their departure from the military. In short, the idea is to help them gain employment in the civilian medical sector more quickly.

• And finally, added language that told the Defense Department to look for more opportunities for sourcing the textiles it needs for military uniforms from domestic manufacturers - which is a fancy way of saying that North Carolina is big on textiles and we’d love to do more business with the DOD.

Will all of these survive? Not sure. They’re in the bill, but now the bill has hit a speed bump. Once that gets fixed, maybe someone in the Senate will object and decide to pluck out one of our amendments. We shall see!

The big deadline approaches

The way campaigns like ours work is that every few months you have to report how much money you’ve raised.

Those reports are - somewhat surprisingly - hugely influential. 

Especially in a statewide 50/50 race like ours, they get a lot of press attention and, as a result, have a tendency to set the tone for the campaign.

Our big deadline is the end of this month. After that, we won’t have another one come out until the week before the election, so this is pretty much the biggest one of the whole campaign.

That’s my polite way of saying that if you can help us out now, it would be very well-timed.

You can contribute here (ActBlue) or here (non-ActBlue). Both fund our campaign directly, and thank you for your support.

Best,

Jeff

P.S. - I made a short video explaining how culture war amendments took over the defense bill at the last minute and you can watch it on Instagram here, even if you don’t have an account: