Abstract
Earlier this year Cong. Duncan Hunter, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, pledged that a record $447 billion for military spending would show that fiscal 2005 would be “the year of the soldier.” Some considered this a welcome departure from business as usual on Capitol Hill, where every year is “the year of the contractor.” In May the House designated $1.1 billion of the $447 billion spending bill to buy additional body armor and armored Humvees for the 40,000 soldiers left underprotected in Iraq. (Even with body armor, maiming injuries have been sustained by a large but still unknown fraction of the estimated 6,000 soldiers who have been wounded to date.)
But even as the House majority claimed the mantle of democracy-building in Iraq, it was doing its utmost to stifle democratic debate here at home. The tightly controlled, brief, and uninspiring House debate on military spending proved that the Congress of the United States now has only one deliberative body–the Senate.
“It is unfortunate that the House Republican leadership has allowed more time to debate the renaming of post offices from the floor this year than time to debate the Defense Authorization bill during a time of war,” fumed Texas Democrat Chet Edwards during a truncated debate on the National Defense Authorization Bill in May. He added: “It is sad that the muzzling of democracy continues here in the United States, even as American citizens die and try to bring democracy to Iraq.”
House members had presented nearly 100 amendments to the Republican-controlled Rules Committee; the committee approved only 28 for consideration by the full House–18 to be offered by Republicans, 10 by Democrats.
Made humble by years of abuse, the Democrats sought a modest, six-hour debate of the issues underlying the proposed expenditure of some $447 billion–$422 billion in the “base bill,” with an additional $25 billion for four more months of war in Iraq. In other words, they asked for one minute of debate for every $1.25 billion of expenditure, or an average of 50 seconds of speaking time for each member of the House. But the Rules Committee, in its wisdom, decreed only two hours of general debate–one minute of debate for every $3.7 billion of expenditure, or 16.5 seconds for each member.
In the end, the two-hour debate mainly consisted of the chairmen and ranking minority members of the various Armed Services subcommittees congratulating each other and Chairman Hunter on their collective zeal for national defense.
A few Democratic members came briefly to the floor and described the amendments they would have offered, had they not been denied the opportunity, but in most cases they prefaced their remarks with words of support for the overall bill. Then it was on to consideration of the 28 amendments. Sixteen, it turned out, were minor, non-controversial amendments on matters like the inclusion of landscaping services and pest control in a Pentagon contracting program and the composition of the Air Force Academy's Board of Visitors. These were consolidated in an “en bloc” amendment and passed by voice vote. Sixteen down, 12 to go.
Of the remaining amendments, only eight were important enough to warrant a recorded vote. Five of these were actually offered by Republicans, including one by Hunter to his own bill. That left the Democrats with only three amendments worthy of a recorded vote, one of which concerned new Pentagon guidelines for dealing with sexual assault; it passed overwhelmingly, without a single dissenting vote.
Democrats were thus able to offer just two contested amendments, each of which was allotted 10 minutes to each side for debate. Both, as expected, failed passage on close votes. Because both had been offered and failed in previous years, they presented little risk of uncovering new fissures over policy that could loosen the majority's vise grip on its own robotized ranks. The first sought repeal of the existing prohibition on servicewomen and female dependents using their own funds for abortions at overseas military hospitals. The second sought to shift just $37 million–chump change by Pentagon standards–from the Energy Department's Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator and Advanced Concepts programs to accounts supporting increased intelligence and conventional attack capabilities against hard and deeply buried targets.
This amendment failed on a close vote, 204-214. While significant as a touchstone for the broader policy debate about the administration's evolving infatuation with preemption and limited nuclear strikes, the amendment–even if successful–would have made a barely discernable dent in the $6.8 billion proposed for nuclear weapons in fiscal 2005.
When all was said and done, full House consideration and approval of the $447 billion measure consumed less than nine hours (including roll call votes)–an “authorization rate,” if you will, of $50 billion per hour. Never have so few doled out so many dollars so fast–it must be some kind of a record.
There was simply no debate on the larger purposes, strategies, and consequences that lie behind these massive defense expenditures. Nor was there any reasoned and informed discourse on the strategic rationales and technical performance of particular programs, including troubled multibillion dollar defense system acquisitions, many of which, like the $10 billion program for missile defense, conceal boondoggles far removed from the exigencies of the war on terror.
The House's lack of free and fair debate is truly astonishing, a bizarre state of affairs for the supposed exemplar and guardian of democracy. But it is of a piece with the majority's other manifold hypocrisies, as when it inveighs against free-spending liberals while racking up record deficits, “clears” the skies by allowing increased pollution from power plants, reduces dependence on imported oil by providing tax incentives for gas-guzzling vehicles, and invades other countries in the name of nonproliferation, even as it pushes U.S. nuclear weapons spending to levels not seen since the peak of Cold War spending in the Reagan era.
Can you build democracy abroad while stifling it at home?
Here is a small sampling of defense bill amendments proposed by Democrats that the majority-controlled Rules Committee barred from consideration by the full House:
To cope with the recent epidemic of rapes and assaults against women in the military services, California's Loretta Sanchez sought to modify the Uniform Code of Military Justice to bring it into conformity with modern criminal sexual assault statutes.
South Carolina's John Spratt, citing his 22 years of service on the House Committee on Armed Services and his stature as the second-ranking Democrat, observed that “if there is any comity left in this institution, surely I should have the right to offer one well-considered, carefully crafted, very serious amendment” to take $414 million out of the $1.2 billion proposed increase for missile defense and move it to pay increases for noncommissioned officers and premiums on a group life insurance plan for soldiers serving in combat zones.
California's Jane Harman, the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, sought to postpone additional expenditures for a ground-based missile defense system in Alaska that has not met operational testing requirements and to divert the funds to improvements in port security.
Massachusetts' Ed Markey sought to eliminate $29.8 million in advance funding for a $2.4 billion Modern Pit Facility for producing new plutonium cores for nuclear weapons.
Democrats also wanted to offer a number of amendments to deal with the prisoner abuse situation: Washington State's Norman Dicks sought to enumerate in law a list of prohibited interrogation techniques; New York's Steve Israel sought very detailed reporting on the role of contractors as interrogators; and Barbara Lee of California sought to make a database of detainee names available to families and create an international commission to monitor detainee treatment. David Price of North Carolina and Christopher Shays of Connecticut (a Republican) jointly sought to close loopholes in existing law regarding the prosecution of contractors who commit crimes overseas.