Facing a veto

Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and Rep. Mac Thornberry (R-TX) have joined forces to make their final appeal for passage of the fiscal year 2016 defense authorization bill the White House has said President Obama will veto.

McCain and Thornberry, who chair the armed services committees in their respective chambers, said Tuesday at the Brookings Institution that Obama is using the potential veto of their defense policy bill as leverage in a larger, high-level budget fight with the GOP.

"What bothers us is it's clear the president is holding this legislation -- regarding defense of the country and the men and women who serve it -- hostage to a process of budgetary procedure which the defense bill has nothing to do with," McCain said.

"Exactly," Thornberry added.

Both lawmakers argued that Obama should instead focus his efforts on the defense appropriations bill, which would actually allocate funding.

"If he has have a problem with the level of appropriations, then it seems to me that fight should be with the appropriators," McCain said. "We authorize. This is a big bill. Of all the reforms, all the benefits and pay -- it seems to me he's picked the wrong target."

The proposed bill would authorize $499 billion in Defense Department base spending in line with the mandatory 2011 Budget Control Act spending caps. However, the bill would add $38 billion to the president's $51 billion request for the Pentagon's overseas contingency operations (OCO) account because it is exempt from the BCA caps. Democrats have refused to pass any bill that does not also circumvent the BCA caps for other areas of government. The defense authorization bill, however, does contain language that allows OCO funding to be transferred to the base account in the event of a bipartisan budget deal.

McCain said he and Thornberry were actually opposed to the GOP's proposed OCO maneuver and would prefer to see a deal that lifts the BCA caps, but were hamstrung by the law currently in place.

"Mac and I really dislike it because we'd like to see a multiyear level of authorization that we can plan on rather than lurching from one year to the next," he said.

Thornberry noted that a defense authorization bill has been passed for 53 consecutive years.

"In some ways, I think this is kind of an inside Washington political game that loses sight of what we are asking men and women to for us," he said. "In that way, I think it is tragic."

McCain and Thornberry declined to elaborate on any possible "plan B" should Obama veto the bill, but several staffers have said the committees have no current plan in place if the president were to do so.

Mackenzie Eaglen, a defense budget analyst at the American Enterprise Institute, told Inside Defense it was unrealistic to think the bill could be "disaggregated" to a point where the budgetary authorizations were stripped away, leaving nothing but policy provisions.

"Taking the money out is not an option," she said. "It negates the GOP-passed -- and therefore binding -- budget resolution. If it were that easy, the GOP would've caved long ago."

Taking such a step would also have a negative impact on defense modernization, she explained.

"Stripping OCO disproportionately hits modernization accounts," she said. "There may not be agreement on how to fund the government this year, but there is near-universal agreement that this is a long-neglected DOD priority and the slide must be stopped and eventually reversed."

To further complicate matters, she said, the impending retirement of House Speaker John Boehner (R-OH) and the intense GOP turmoil over finding his successor have left the White House with few options in terms of finding a Republican leader to help negotiate a budget deal before the ongoing continuing resolution expires on Dec. 11.

"The most likely scenario is that the two [armed services committee] chairmen begin actively lobbying leaders and the White House for a budget deal before Boehner leaves Washington so that the [authorization] bill can be the very next bill that moves behind it," Eaglen said.

If a budget deal cannot be reached by Dec. 11, Congress can avert a government shutdown by extending the CR, though Pentagon officials have warned that a yearlong CR would have devastating impacts on defense because the department would be prohibited from funding new-start programs or planned production increases in weapon systems.