Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, had been pushing for votes on four key amendments dealing with defense spending. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images Senate sidesteps controversy, passes mammoth defense bill

The Senate sidestepped controversy Monday and overwhelmingly passed a sweeping $692 billion defense policy bill for the new fiscal year.

Scrapped without votes were a handful of contentious proposals to prevent transgender troops from being kicked out of the military, eliminate across-the-board budget cuts, bar indefinite detention of U.S. citizens and launch a new round of military base realignments and closures.


The annual National Defense Authorization Act was passed 89-8, setting up what could be contentious negotiations with the House over a series of key policy differences on the must-pass legislation.

The House passed its version of the bill in July. And the two chambers are expected to soon form a joint conference committee to hammer out their differences and negotiate a final compromise.

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, who managed the bill on the Senate floor, while undergoing treatment for brain cancer, had been pushing for votes on four key amendments dealing with defense spending, indefinite detention, Buy America requirements and restrictions on defense medical research. But with the chamber deadlocked on the issue, Senate leaders instead moved to finish the bill quickly.

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"It's not right," the Arizona Republican lamented last week on the Senate floor. "Every 1 of the 100 senators should be able should be able to vote, to amend and to debate. That's what the Senate is supposed to be all about."

In a full week of floor consideration, the Senate took just one roll call vote on an amendment — a procedural move to kill an amendment from Sen. Rand Paul to repeal both the 2001 and 2002 war authorizations, The Kentucky Republican had blocked efforts to speed consideration of the bill in order to secure the vote.

Senators from both parties support adopting a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force to govern the campaign against the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria. But Paul's amendment was sidelined last week in a bipartisan move.

The amendment deadlock blocked a vote on a proposal by Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that would have repealed sequestration, the procedural mechanism used to enforce spending caps set under the 2011 Budget Control Act. McCain and other defense hawks had, sought a vote on the measure as a way of evading the caps and boosting the defense budget.

The measure also would have repealed the automatic cuts for domestic spending, making for a difficult potential vote for Democrats.

Other highly anticipated amendments scuttled included a measure from Sens. Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N.Y.) and Susan Collins (R-Maine), pushing back on President Donald Trump's ban on transgender individuals serving in the military.

Their amendment would have barred the Pentagon from discharging actively serving transgender service members based on their gender identity and legally mandated the review of the military's transgender policy being conducted by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis.

Instead, Gillibrand and Collins have introduced a standalone transgender troop bill that mirrors their amendment. And both McCain and Senate Armed Services ranking Democrat Jack Reed of Rhode Island have signed on as cosponsors.

McCain and Reed also pushed for the Senate to consider their amendment to authorize a new base realignment and closure round, but the measure drew considerable opposition from senators from both parties and key workers' unions.

The Pentagon had requested a new BRAC round, arguing it would save upward of $2 billion a year. But members of Congress have questioned that assumption, pointing instead to the costly 2005 base closure round.

The Senate did, however, adopt a package of more than 100 amendments offered by both Republicans and Democrats.

The package included a proposal from Sens. Bill Nelson (D-Fla.) and Cotton to prohibit the creation of a Space Corps, directly pushing back on a House Armed Services-led effort to create such a new military service in the Air Force

The difference is likely to be a marquee issue when the House and Senate begin negotiations on a final defense bill.

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Just before Monday's final vote, the Senate adopted a second package of more than 40 noncontroversial, bipartisan amendments.

The legislation authorizes approximately $632 billion in national defense spending, including the base Pentagon budget as well as nuclear weapons programs in the Energy Department — well above the $603 billion requested by the administration. The legislation also recommends $60 billion for a separate war account.

Like its House counterpart, the Senate defense bill calls for a down payment on a massive military buildup and more funding to dig out of what some defense observers call crisis-level readiness shortfalls.

Throughout floor debate, McCain underscored the urgency of the situation by pointing to a recent series of deadly air and naval mishaps.

"We are killing more of our own people in training than our enemies are in combat," McCain said. "And we were warned about this."

But both the Senate and House versions of the legislation recommend spending well in excess of caps set by the Budget Control Act.

For the new 2018 fiscal year beginning Oct. 1, the law authorizes $549 billion in base defense spending, not including war funding. For a major military buildup to become a reality, lawmakers will need to strike a deal to either raise or eliminate the caps on the defense budget, though a deal doesn't appear imminent.

"Sequestration would be triggered and ... this would be a very complicated situation," Reed said. "We would be giving money on one hand and taking it back with the other literally."