Senate leaders face conservative rebellion on annual defense bill

Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Republican Leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.) are facing a rebellion from conservative senators over the annual National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), which has passed on time for 62 years in a row.

The battle over the popular bipartisan bill will come to a head Tuesday.

Sens. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.), Rand Paul (R-Ky.) and Mike Lee (R-Utah) are raising objections to the popular bill, forcing Schumer to scramble to keep it on track.

Hawley is protesting the decision to strip from the bill his amendment to extend the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act to cover families in the St. Louis area who have been exposed to improperly stored radioactive waste.

He vowed last week to use every procedural tool at his disposal to delay the legislation but the Senate rules protect bills that come out of Senate-House conference negotiations, limiting his options. 

Hawley was mulling the option of offering a motion to recommit the legislation to conference to protest the lack of funding for radiation victims in his home state, but Schumer pulled a deft maneuver by offering a motion to recommit first, in effect blocking Republicans from using the tactic, according to Senate aides.

Now Hawley is planning to offer a motion to simply table the entire bill, according to a source familiar with the jockeying over floor procedure. The vote to table the bill is expected to fail, but it will serve to send a message to the Senate leadership.

“I’ll do everything I can to block it,” Hawley told The Hill. “We have a version that we have shared with leadership that reauthorizes [the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act.] The total cost is minimal. It’s several billion [dollars] over the course of the lifetime of this program.”

Hawley is blaming McConnell and Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) for pulling his amendment, which passed the Senate 61-37 in July, out of the bill.

A Senate GOP leadership aide said Hawley’s amendment was excluded because the senator couldn’t find a “pay-for” to cover the added cost of his proposal.

“It’s particularly, I will tell you, galling to hear that we need to spend $100 billion on Ukraine and $50 billion on Taiwan … but we don’t have any money to help the victims of our own government on a Defense program,” Hawley said. “My state, we’ve never gotten a dime in 60 years.”

Workers in St. Louis 80 years ago helped develop the first atomic bomb by processing uranium that was later used to create the first sustained nuclear reaction at the University of Chicago’s Stagg Field.

Paul and Lee are objecting to a four-month extension of Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) embedded in the defense bill. The Section 702 language allows the National Security Agency to intercept broad swaths of foreign communications without individualized court orders, inevitably sweeping up the conversations of American citizens.

“Approving FISA without reforming it is a huge mistake,” Paul said. “It goes against our own rules, our rules say that the conference report can only include things that were in the House version or the Senate version. This is being airdropped into something the rules say you can’t do.

Paul said he plans to raise a point of order objection to the NDAA, which means Schumer and McConnell need to round up 60 votes to quash Paul’s blockade.

“To me, there’s nothing more important than the Bill of Rights protecting our civil liberties in this country. The Fourth Amendment says they can’t search your phone, they can’t search your house without a judge. But FISA allows them to do that without a real warrant,” Paul said.

He explained that under current FISA law, the federal government can search for American citizens’ names and email addresses in the database of the intercepted conversations of foreign targets.

Lee urged Senate colleagues in a Blaze Media op-ed to vote against the defense bill with the four-month FISA extension.

He argues the FBI has used Section 702 to conduct warrantless “backdoor” searches of Americans’ private electronic communications “quite deliberately and on hundreds of thousands of occasions.”

He blasted leaders for “hiding” the FISA extension in a 3,000-page must-pass bill.

“Shameful,” he charged.

Paul and Lee presented arguments to the Senate parliamentarian Monday, and an aide to Paul confirmed he will go ahead and raise his objection to the FISA language.

The defense bill may be subject to another procedural objection challenging the Pentagon’s policy of reimbursing service members who travel to obtain abortions.

Despite the rumblings of Hawley, Paul and Lee, Senate GOP leaders say the bill is on track to pass as soon as Wednesday.

“The Senate will need to move before the House and hopefully get it to the House in a reasonable time frame for them to process it before they head out for the holidays,” said Senate Republican Whip John Thune (S.D.) of the timing of the defense bill.

The Senate is expected to pass the bill by Wednesday and then send it to the House, where it will be placed on the chamber’s suspension calendar to ensure faster action. Bills on the suspension calendar require a two-thirds majority to pass.

Schumer filed a cloture motion last week to end debate on the Senate defense bill and advance it to a final vote.

He announced the Senate will “move forward” and the defense bill after lunch Tuesday.

“We must pass the annual defense authorization bill, which has been one of the most bipartisan priorities in Congress for over 60 years,” Schumer said Monday. “This will be our focus on the floor this week.”

The Senate is slated to vote Tuesday on the cloture motion to end debate on the defense bill, setting up a vote on final passage Wednesday.

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