House Passes Defense Bill That Restricts ‘Woke’ Policies
It includes an amendment to ban the Pentagon from reimbursing troops’ travel costs to get an abortion.
The House passed the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) for fiscal year 2024, 219-210.
Democrats and Republicans crossed party lines.
The biggest parts of the bill would roll back the woke initiatives the Defense Department has instilled since Biden took office:
The clearest signal that Republicans would go their own way came on Thursday when the House narrowly adopted Rep. Ronny Jackson‘s (R-Texas) amendment to block Pentagon policies that reimburse travel costs for troops seeking abortions.
Democrats telegraphed that the proposal was a red line. The measure was adopted anyway in a 221-213 vote, with only two Republicans breaking ranks.
Republicans didn’t stop there. They muscled through proposals to end coverage of transition surgeries and hormone treatments for transgender troops, gut diversity and inclusion programs and limit the specific flags that can be flown at military installations — a move that would effectively ban flying the pride flag.
The abortion block is huge. The Pentagon’s policy barely gets by the Hyde Amendment, which bans the use of tax money to pay for abortions.
The Armed Services Committee addressed other issues during the legislation’s markup in June.
The markups include a plan to bring back troops who the Pentagon kicked out because they refused the COVID vaccine.
They also included “barring funding for drag shows on military bases and banning the promotion of critical race theory.”
All the spending, though:
In all, the legislation authorizes $886 billion for national defense programs in fiscal 2024, the same amount requested by President Joe Biden and equal to a spending cap set for defense spending in a recent debt limit deal.
The price tag includes $842 billion for the Pentagon and another $32 billion for nuclear weapons programs at the Energy Department. The legislation doesn’t actually provide any funding, however, and must be followed by appropriations legislation.
Unfortunately, this likely won’t pass the Senate. The upper chamber is working on its own NDAA, but maybe Sens. Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema will knock some common sense into their colleagues.
Biden’s handlers will tell him not to sign it.
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The numbers in the photo at the top threw me for a loop until I saw it was from 2021 when the Demtards had the majority.
No comments yet and I have no comment other than we are funding abortions and tranny surgery in our military which does not increase the readyness of our forces to fight a war in Ukraine Brandon is determined to get us into. My daughter is deploying to Germany now, I am a Vet of both Panama and Granada but I told her not to go and get out of this crapshoot. She is too close to retirement, though
BTW: God Bless our men and women in uniform our asshole in chief is determined to murder to cover up all of his, Hillary’s and other Dems corruption in Ukraine.
Mmmmm $32 billion for nuclear weapons. It warms my cockles, although I do not know what a cockle is. Enrich the Uranium! Manufacture the Plutonium!
Erronius
On a related note about the level of spending, this defense bill comes in at $886 Billion. The current (projected) budget deficit of $228 Billion is 2.57 X last years $89 Billion. That doesn’t sound so bad, until you realize that’s for the month of June alone. The cumulative deficit for the first 9 months of this FY is $1.393 Trillion (yes Trillion with T).
What’s that got to do with the DoD budget? The govt has accumulated $652 Billion in interest on the national debt, but that’s only on the first 9 months of the FY. If we assume merely a constant annualized increase in the last Quarter then we will arrive at $870 Billion in interest on the debt for this FY alone.For comparison all the money for DoD spending next year is $886 while interest on existing debt this year is $870, assuming no black swan much less extra rate hikes.
The bottom line is these numbers point to the end of that road most people prefer to kick the debt can down. Everyone who keeps telling themselves and others that the known future funding shortfalls in big programs like Social Security, Medicare potentially as soon as ’26 will somehow magically work themselves out without any meaningful sacrifice are selling bunk.
If debt service, interest on our (growing) $32 Trillion+ National Debt, is coming in now at roughly equal to the DoD budget then a crowding out effect for other programs is soon to follow. Programs will have to be cut to make the interest payments to bond holders OR default on the debt OR turn on the printing press at the Fed Reserve to inflate our way out of debt (a variation of default) OR massively raise Taxes, (which will be on the middle class b/c that’s where the easy money is).
Schumer and McConnell will send it back and McCarthy will capitulate. Rinse and repeat.
Anything that doesn’t relate to killing the enemy (instead of killing babies) should be banned! Get the armed forces back to concentrating on their primary mission once again, bringing death and destruction to the enemy where ever they may be hiding.
Time to call the Waaaaaahhhhbulance for the Democrats. They call it an attack on trans, black and other people while ignoring the normalcy of defense spending.
CommoChief
I appreciate your comment.
If you take your line of thinking to its inevitable conclusion, you will come to understand that the federal government cannot bring the debt under control. The pressures that the individual members of congress are subjected to do not align with austerity.
The final conclusion will end in total bankruptcy, but not before the federal government prints so much money that all of the savings of the middle class is reduced to nothing.
Erronius
There lots of way to bring govt spending under control but the politicians ain’t likely to do it. That’s absolutely true. We largely have ourselves to blame b/c many of us liked free stuff more than we did fiscal responsibility.
As an example, all the folks with their head in the sand about the looming Social Security/Medicare funding shortfall. In a perfect world the Boomer and Silent generation would have STFU a couple decades ago and allowed revisions to the program to impact mostly Gen X in raising the retirement age, increasing the # of years worked from 10 to 25 to qualify for benefits, ending the ‘spousal option’ and so on.Doing it two decades ago would have been relatively painless. We could have designed it to minimize any impact on Boomers b/c the timeline to apply the reforms and gain savings was longer.
Instead the AARP was the pied piper, they, the Silent Gen and the Boomers bullied Congress into refusing reform. When reforms do come they will be far more draconian and current beneficiaries won’t be spared. Most Gen X and younger voters know Social Security is gonna be at least 25% less generous for them and that the opposition to reform that made it so was led by current beneficiaries. We already reduced our expectations of the program. The Gen X and younger voters are, at this point and with this context, unlikely to support a series of reforms which exempts current beneficiaries and puts all the pain on Gen X and younger voters. I know I will demand equal generational pain and shared sacrifice.