‘Last Bill That Works:’ End Of An Era For National Defense Authorization Act?

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http://breakingdefense.com/2013/12/last-bill-that-works-end-of-an-era-for-national-defense-authorization-act/



Bill Greenwalt played a major role in crafting the defense policy bill — the National Defense Authorization Act — each year for almost a decade, helping to squire the bill through the personalities and politics of the ever-fractious Senate. Now the muzzle is off — he’s a defense expert at the American Enterprise Institute – and Bill can offer us the hard-earned wisdom he garnered on the Hill, in the Pentagon and in industry. With the current sad estate of affairs on Capitol Hill — mindless partisanship, sequestration deadlock, poll rankings in the single digits, rudderless leaders — Bill looks at perhaps the last single bill Congress can usually pass on a bipartisan basis, the NDAA. Is the process that made the bill a model — for the US Congress — of reason, commitment and patriotism now dead? Read on, MacDuff (apologies to The Bard). The Editor

‘Last Bill That Works:’ End Of An Era For National Defense Authorization Act?
By Bill Greenwalt
on December 10, 2013 at 11:10 AM

The Senate returned to work yesterday and Senator Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), and Buck McKeon, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee (HASC), announced a deal on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2014. For those who still hold out any hope that the Congress can work in the face of ever-rising partisanship and a massive breakdown in comity, this agreement is bittersweet. While the deal offers a way forward, it appears that Senate leadership support for the bill is waning which will make it harder for the NDAA to pass in future years.

It is obvious now that the passage to the floor for the Senate NDAA had been blocked. The managers of the bill, Senators Levin and Inhofe, did not have any luck in their negotiations with their respective leadership to reach an agreement that would allow the bill to be completed on the Senate floor.

The odds were never in their favor. It has always been a challenging task to broker a deal to limit amendments and debate on the Senate version of the NDAA. It is now even harder since Senator Reid exercised the “nuclear option” on changing the filibuster rule in the Senate. The only alternative was to end-round Senate floor action (just as was done in 2010) and negotiate a more streamlined bill with the House that can hopefully pass the Senate by unanimous consent or after limited debate.

For the 52 years that the NDAA has been in existence, it has looked many times as if the bill would not make it over the goal line. In the end, cooler heads prevailed to ensure final passage and necessary compromises were reached. This time was different. The toxicity of the political environment and the absence of a bipartisan defense consensus meant the Senate did not spend the necessary time to debate the bill. It just did not seem important enough to the Senate leadership to justify spending the political capital.