This week: Orlando shooting likely to influence spending bills

A week in Congress that was already slated to have lawmakers promoting the national defense will be further colored by this weekend’s massacre in Orlando that authorities say constituted both a terrorist attack and a hate crime.

{mosads}The House is expected to consider the annual spending bill for the Defense Department, this time with a limited amendment process to allow GOP leaders more control over the outcome.

Yet Democrats may try to frame the events that led to House Republicans’s decision to start clamping down on the amendments offered to appropriations bills in an even harsher light in the aftermath of the attack on the gay nightclub in Orlando that killed 50 people and wounded 53 more. 

GOP leaders decided to begin cherry-picking which amendments to annual appropriations bills will get votes after Democrats repeatedly forced votes on proposals last month that enforced a 2014 executive order prohibiting federal contractors from discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation or gender.

An Energy Department spending bill collapsed on the House floor last month after an amendment from Rep. Sean Patrick Maloney (D-N.Y.), who is gay, enforcing the prohibition against LGBT discrimination was adopted. Many conservatives who objected to Maloney’s amendment on the basis of concerns about conflicts with religious freedom subsequently voted against the underlying appropriations legislation.

Democrats are sure to try to file that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender anti-discrimination amendment again, even though GOP leaders are all but certain to deny it a vote so that they can avoid letting another culture war erupt on the House floor and threaten the appropriations process. 

Still, the optics couldn’t come at a worse time after the Orlando massacre, which has been deemed the deadliest mass shooting in American history and happened during Pride month. 

Lawmakers of both parties will likely also try to submit amendments requiring Congress to enact a formal war authorization against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) instead of relying on statute passed for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq more than a decade ago. Debate over such measures would come after the FBI said Sunday it suspected the Orland attack was ISIS-linked, which lawmakers will argue should heighten the urgency.

House Democrats have decried GOP leaders’s decision to do away with allowing unlimited amendments to appropriations bills. But before the GOP brought back the practice upon taking the House majority in 2011, Democrats had also instituted a limited amendment process for appropriations bills.

The House so far has passed two of the 12 annual appropriations bills: measures to fund legislative branch operations and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

Even with the limited amendment process, the House and Senate are unlikely to finish work on all 12 bills before departing in mid-July for the party conventions. 

Next up in the Senate is the Commerce, Justice and Science spending bill, which was passed out of the Appropriations Committee in April. 

With an initial procedural vote not expected until Tuesday, the legislation will likely eat up the rest of the Senate’s work week. 

The $56.3-billion proposal funds the Departments of Commerce and Justice, as well as NASA, the National Science Foundation and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. 

 

Similar to other appropriations bills, the legislation includes restrictions on President Obama’s ability to house Guantanamo Bay detainees in the United States. 

Defense authorization

The Senate is poised to pass a wide-ranging defense policy bill, despite opposition from the White House and conservative groups. 

Senators are scheduled to take a final vote on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) Tuesday. The $602 billion bill broadly lays out policy and spending guidelines for the Pentagon and the military service branches. 

Wrapping up work on the bill comes after the Senate held a rare Friday vote, ending debate on the NDAA. 

The move divided Democrats, with Minority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) urging his colleagues to deny cloture and allow more time to hash out a deal on amendments. 

While hundreds of amendments have been filed to the “must-pass” legislation, the Senate’s only had a roll call vote on three of them and approved more than a dozen others by voice vote. 

Republican Sens. John McCain (Ariz.) and Lindsey Graham (S.C.) are blaming the holdup on Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah). 

“In Mike Lee’s world, he has to get what he wants,” Graham told reporters. “I think a lot of us are tired of, you know, one member of the Senate saying, ‘This is so important you can’t anything else unless I get this.’ … It’s out of bounds in the third grade. It should be out of bounds in the Senate.” 

Conn Carroll, a spokesman for Lee, confirmed that the Utah Republican is currently blocking any amendment votes unless he gets a vote on his amendment. 

He added Graham is the only senator currently blocking Lee from getting a vote on banning indefinite detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil.

Graham said he offered Lee a vote on his amendment if he could get a separate vote on an Export-Import Bank amendment, but Sen. Richard Shelby (R-Ala.) objected. 

If the Senate passes its bill it will still have to hash out differences with House lawmakers, who have passed their own proposal. 

Two areas of expected contention will be an extra $18 billion in defense money included in the House bill, and a requirement that women register for the draft included in the Senate version. 

Heritage Action, an influential conservative group, cited the changes to the Selective Service as a reason for senators to vote against the Senate’s NDAA, which it will count as “key vote” in its legislative scorecard. 

“Regardless of whatever merits the bill may have, it deserves to be defeated because lawmakers should not force young women into military services through the Selective Service,” the group said in a release.

The White House is threatening to veto the legislation over a myriad of policy issues, including restrictions on Guantánamo Bay transfers and a cap on the size of the National Security Council staff. 

Obama has threatened to veto the policy bill every year since coming into office, but only done so once, in 2015.

IRS

In addition to moving forward with the appropriations process this week, the House is expected to consider legislation authored by Rep. Peter Roskam (R-Ill.) to prohibit the IRS from requiring tax-exempt organizations to include the identifying information of contributors in annual tax returns. 

A vote on the bill comes as GOP leaders grapple with potentially allowing a House floor vote before the summer recess to impeach IRS Commissioner John Koskinen.

Hard-line conservatives in the House Freedom Caucus have been pushing for a vote to impeach Koskinen for months. They pressured Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) to either hold hearings on impeaching Koskinen or else force a vote on the House floor.

The House Judiciary Committee held its first hearing last month on potential impeachment and is expected to hold another hearing this month on the issue.

In the meantime, House GOP leaders can use the vote on the legislation this week as a way to show conservatives they’re taking action on punishing the IRS over the targeting of conservative groups.