“At this point, the House of Representatives will be adjourning for the year at the end of this week, and there is simply no way we can debate and vote on those amendments to the pending bill, get cloture, pass the bill, go to conference with the House, get a conference report written, and have it adopted by the House of Representatives all before the House goes out of session this Friday. There simply is no way all of those events can take place to get a defense bill passed”, said Senator Levin.
On December 9, Senator Carl Levin of Michigan asked for and was granted permission to address the full senate on a matter concerning the National Defense Authorization Act 2014.
“Mr. President, before we left for the Thanksgiving break, Senator Inhofe and I said we would come to the Senate floor today to update Members on the status of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014.”
“Before the break we spent a week on the Senate floor trying to bring more amendments up and to have them debated and voted on, but we were unable to do so. We tried to reach agreement to limit consideration to defense-related amendments, but we were unable to do that. We tried to get consent to vote on two sexual assault amendments–the Gillibrand amendment and the McCaskill amendment–that had been fully debated, but we could not get that consent. We tried to get consent to lock in additional amendments for votes and to move a package of cleared amendments, but we were unable to do so”, he said.
“At this point, the House of Representatives will be adjourning for the year at the end of this week, and there is simply no way we can debate and vote on those amendments to the pending bill, get cloture, pass the bill, go to conference with the House, get a conference report written, and have it adopted by the House of Representatives all before the House goes out of session this Friday. There simply is no way all of those events can take place to get a defense bill passed”, said Levin.
“So Senator Inhofe and I believe it is our responsibility to the Armed Services Committee, to the Senate, to our men and women in uniform, and to the country to do everything we can to enact a defense authorization bill. For this reason, we are taking the same approach we took when we were unable to finish the bill and go to conference with the House in 2008 and 2010. What we did is we sat down with our counterparts on the House side–in this case, chairman Buck McKeon and ranking member Adam Smith of the House Armed Services Committee–and we set our staffs to work to come up with a bill that would have a chance of getting passed by both Houses”, he continued.
“The four of us have reached agreement on a bill that we hope will be passed by the House before it recesses this Friday and, if it does, then be considered by the Senate next week”, said Senator Levin (source: Congressional Record http://thomas.loc.gov).
See related video: Congress to fund Pentagon’s war machine http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zc_9zJaOn3E