Democrats use Pentagon policy bill to close loopholes Trump exposed
Some direct closer scrutiny — by the military, the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security — of domestic terror threats posed by antisemitism, neo-Nazi groups and white supremacist ideologies, as well as groups on the far right such as the Proud Boys, are now the subject of investigation by federal prosecutors and the House select committee examining the insurrection. Another would give the mayor of D.C. the authority to mobilize the National Guard during an emergency — or another major security crisis.
The apparent sense of urgency goes beyond the simple fact that passing stand-alone legislation is difficult in a polarized Congress, observers say.
“Particularly if Republicans take the House, as many expect that they will, it’ll just be that much harder to get any of these kinds of fixes into big bills — because Republicans will have control of what comes to the floor in the House,” said Molly Reynolds, a congressional expert with the Brookings Institution.
Come 2023, should Democrats lose the handful of seats necessary to drive them into the minority, it would complicate “the idea of anything being portrayed as anti-Trump, especially if Trump comes out and says more formally that he’s running in 2024,” Reynolds said.
The annual defense authorization bill often serves as a forum for policy that radiates beyond the Pentagon, but it’s far from guaranteed that all or even any of these provisions will become law. Last year, for instance, the House agreed to upgrade to the D.C. mayor’s ability to mobilize the city’s National Guard units, but the idea was dropped during negotiations with the Senate and absent from the final bill that Congress sent to President Biden for approval.
The political divisions shaping lawmakers’ calculations were thrown into sharp relief in recent days, when the House voted on an amendment to the defense bill offered by Rep. Bradley Schneider (D-Ill.) to compel the Defense Department, the FBI and DHS to establish “strategies to combat White supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in the uniformed services and Federal law enforcement agencies,” as the measure read. This has been a focus of Schneider’s since 2017, but attracted much broader interest in the aftermath of Jan. 6.
Not a single House Republican voted in favor of the venture. It was adopted into the House’s defense bill solely with Democratic support.
Many supporters of the Trump-themed provisions, all of which were included in the House’s final defense bill through the amendment process, have been clear what — and who — inspired their legislative efforts.
“On January 6, 2021, as our democracy was under attack, D.C.’s mayor was unable to call out the D.C. National Guard, wasting hours and potentially costing lives,” Reps. Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.); Anthony G. Brown (D-Md.); and Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), D.C.’s delegate to Congress, said in a joint statement this week. “The January 6th attack on the Capitol demonstrated why this authority belongs in the hands of D.C.’s mayor and not the president.”
At the same time, not every amendment that could have corrective effects on the government firmament that came to a breaking point under Trump is presented as a direct clap-back to his presidency.
For example, the House approved a GOP initiative to create a dedicated inspector general for the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), a White House organization at the heart of Trump’s first impeachment over his administration’s withholding of U.S. security assistance to Ukraine.
It was through the OMB that Trump ordered the successive holds on distributing military hardware to the government in Kyiv — millions of dollars in aid he sought to use as leverage with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, who Trump wanted to announce an investigation with the potential to damage a political rival, then-former vice president Joe Biden.
A spokesman for the lead author, Rep. Virginia Foxx (R-N.C.), did not respond to an inquiry about the motivations for the amendment. OMB administers the entirety of the federal government’s budget, an oftentimes arcane undertaking that has prompted a wide spectrum of calls for transparency and scrutiny.
The defense bill also seeks to build on a 2021 provision to replace Confederate names on military installations — which Trump used as grounds to veto the legislation, prompting a historic congressional override — with an initiative from Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D-Tex.) to recognize African Americans “who have served in the Armed Forces with honor, heroism, and distinction by increasing the number of military installations, infrastructure, vessels, and weapon systems named” for them.
Efforts to erase the military’s Confederate lineage gained bipartisan support in Congress after the murder of George Floyd spurred broad introspection over the country’s history of racism. Floyd’s killing by a Minneapolis police officer set off massive protests in the spring of 2020, including in D.C., where the Trump administration’s decision to summon large numbers of National Guard personnel and federal law enforcement to the nation’s capital was met with objections from the mayor.
Read More: Democrats use Pentagon policy bill to close loopholes Trump exposed