House easily passes its defense measure

Senate has yet to weigh in with its version of the bill.

WASHINGTON — The House of Representatives voted overwhelmingly Thursday to pass its version of an annual bill to fund defense programs and U.S. military operations, despite objections from the White House over key ele- ments of Pentagon restructuring and from Democrats over how it revamps the country’s nuclear arsenal.

The 351 to 66 vote is not the final word on the matter, as the Senate has yet to weigh in with its version of the defense bill, which the Senate Armed Services Committee completed work on this week. The two measures must be combined into a final product before Congress can vote to send it to the president’s desk.

House Speaker Paul Ryan, R-Wis., cheered the passage of the bill as the next step in “a new era for our military,” he said, noting that era began last year with “the biggest increase in defense funding in 15 years,” over and above what President Donald Trump had wanted.

But the $717 billion cost of the House’s defense measure caused some sticker shock among Democrats and a handful of the most conservative voices in the GOP, where members have argued against allowing defense spending to grow at a time when the national debt is ballooning.

“To say that that’s a math problem is the understatement of the evening,” top House Armed Services Committee Democrat Rep. Adam Smith of Washington said during the debate, adding that “I think we are overemphasizing nuclear weap- ons, number one, in terms of the amount of money that we are spending on them.”

Smi t h, who voted for the bill, was one of several Democrats who nonetheless objected to its authorization of low-yield nuclear weapons, which the Trump administration has argued are a key part of deterring nuclear threats from other countries, particularly Russia. Smith argued that “think- ing there is such a thing as a tactical nuclear weapon, a weapon small enough that it doesn’t really rise to the level of the other nuclear weapons, I think is a mistake” - but Democrats failed to muster enough votes to strip the authorization from the bill.

The parties had earlier clashed on another nuclear measure that was included in the bill: a sense of Congress that if Trump could not certify within a year of the measure’s passage that Russia was in full compliance with the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia, the United States would no longer consider itself bound by it.

The White House objected to several of the policy positions in the measure, but stopped short of threatening to veto the bill.

The administration argued that the measure should have included funding to build a heftier and more modernized detention facility at Guantanamo Bay; it also admonished lawmakers for not giving the administration the ability to waive certain Russia-related sanctions to allow the United States “to build and sustain key relationships with allies and partners ... while they transition to non-Russian systems,” officials wrote in a statement of administration policy this week.

The administration also objected to certain organizational changes the bill would make at the Pentagon. But it was silent on provisions that would seem to challenge the president’s preferences in other ways — such as a prohibition on the federal government purchasing products from ZTE and other similar foreign tech firms, over security concerns.

Trump recently said that he would try to help China ease import bans on ZTE products to help resuscitate the company.

The bill also includes an 2.6 percent i ncrease in troops’ pay raises, and meets the president’s budget request to fund an additional 16,000 service positions in the military. It also strips back about 25 percent of funding for parts of the Pentagon that are not directly focused on military activities, among other organizational changes at the Pentagon.

‘To say that that’s a math problem is the understatement of the evening. I think we are overemphasizing nuclear weapons, number one, in terms of the amount of money that we are spending on them.’

Rep. Adam Smith D-Washington