The House passed overwhelmingly Thursday a $690 billion defense authorization bill for fiscal year 2012 that fully funds operations in Afghanistan and Iraq and limits President Obama’s authority to deal with Guantanamo detainees and to reduce the number of nuclear weapons.
The White House has warned that those latter provisions could prompt a veto if they were included in the final version of the bill. That prospect remains unclear since the Senate version of the measure has yet to be put together by its Armed Services Committee.
The House measure is $1.1 billion above what the Obama administration originally requested for defense spending for next year. All of that increase is going toward overseas operations. However, lawmakers showed in votes Thursday that they have growing concerns about continuing operations in Afghanistan and U.S. fighting in Libya.
An amendment calling for an accelerated withdrawal from Afghanistan and a fixed timetable for turning military operations over to the Kabul government narrowly went down to defeat, 204 to 215. Last year a similar amendment went down 162 to 260.
At the same time, the House voted 416 to 5 to prohibit the use of U.S. funds to put ground troops in Libya except to rescue an American, such as a downed pilot or a crew member who had bailed out of an aircraft. The prohibition covered the introduction of even contracted American personnel. This limitation reflected growing concern among some members that Obama has ignored the War Powers Act in failing to seek direct congressional authorization for U.S. participation in the fight against Moammar Gaddafi.
The legislation includes a 1.6 percent pay increase for service personnel and, though it increases the amount working-age military retirees will have to pay for their Tricare health care, it would result in lower future fee increases than Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates was seeking.
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Howard P. “Buck” McKeon (R-Calif.) said the bill honors “the service of our military personnel, veterans and their families,” pointing particularly to the pay boost and its protection of Tricare “from steep increases in the future.”
The measure also retains several sections that the Office of Management and Budget warned earlier this week would cause “the president’s senior advisers . . . [to] recommend a veto.”
One would limit the president on cutting nuclear weapons deployed or retired from the stockpile, while another would continue to bar the transfer of detainees from Guantanamo to the United States and prevent them from being prosecuted in courts in this country.
Read more at The Washington Post.