Senate Republicans on Thursday derailed a sweeping $21 billion bill that would have expanded medical, educational and other benefits for veterans — in another chapter of the ongoing feud over amendments, spending and new sanctions on Iran.
Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) moved Wednesday night to cut off debate on the bill and blocked consideration of amendments, including one on Iran sanctions demanded by Republicans. And on Thursday, Democrats came up four votes short of the 60 needed to keep the bill moving forward on a procedural budget vote.
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“I thought that maybe, just on this issue, this Senate could come together and do the right thing for our veterans,” Senate Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) told reporters after the bill was sent back to his committee.
”I am going to keep going on this. We are not going to give up on our veterans,” he vowed. “At some point, we are going to pass this legislation.”
Members of both parties are typically reticent to oppose legislation designed to help veterans and their families, but the downfall of Sanders’s bill underscored the frosty relations in the Senate and Congress at large, where it’s been tough to get much done.
Just two Republicans, Sens. Jerry Moran of Kansas and Dean Heller of Nevada crossed party lines and joined Democrats in their bid to move the bill forward.
Reid, who blocked the Iran amendment and others, blamed Republicans for more obstructionism and killing a bill that would have helped the nation’s 22 million veterans and their families.
Reid said he hoped veterans’ groups were watching the lengths Republicans had gone to “to defeat this bill, because it will be defeated.”
“That was their aim from the very beginning,” Reid said on the Senate floor.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and other Republicans, though, have charged that Democrats were pushing the legislation purely out of election-year politics.
And Democrats didn’t waste time capitalizing on the moment.
Just minutes after the bill was derailed, the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee blasted McConnell, who is facing a tough reelection fight back home, as choosing the “partisan political gridlock that reminded Kentuckians of how he represents everything that’s wrong with Washington” and as being “not on the side of veterans and military families.”
Republicans have charged the bill was too expensive and disputed the way it would be paid for with overseas contingency operations funds used to fund the war in Afghanistan. And that, Republicans argued, wouldn’t amount to real savings, since the money wouldn’t have been spent anyway with the war winding down by year’s end.
By blocking an Iran vote, the Republicans said, Reid was protecting the president from a potentially embarrassing vote.
“What Reid would like to do is take all the votes and push them past the November election,” said North Carolina Sen. Richard Burr, the veterans’ committee’s top Republican.
Sanders, though, told reporters he resented “very much the implication that this was political.”
“The point of the matter is if we had won today … both parties could have gone out and said we finally overcame all of the partisanship we see here in Washington,” Sanders said. “This could have been a political winner, if you like, and certainly a public policy winner for both Democrats and Republicans.”
Reid, meanwhile, charged that by pushing the sanctions provision — offered by Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) and Sen. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.) — Republicans were putting ongoing negotiations in jeopardy, echoing the view of the administration.
“There’s too much at stake to play politics with our nation’s Iran policy,” Reid said.
Heritage Action urged lawmakers to vote ‘no’ on the bill, saying it “fails to make necessary reforms to the VA system that is already overburdened and flawed, harming both veterans truly in need of assistance and taxpayers in the process.”
The measure, solidly supported by more than two dozen veterans groups, would have authorized the Department of Veterans Affairs to open or expand more than two dozen medical centers across the country. It also would extend the life of a program that offers care for veterans with mild to severe brain injuries and make more veterans eligible for in-state tuition at public universities.
The bill would also have restored the cost-of-living military pension cuts for new recruits this year; Congress already restored the cuts for others.
Veterans’ advocates worried the vote, compounded with the earlier move to cut pensions in last year’s budget deal, might be a sign of their waning clout on Capitol Hill, even in an election year.
The vote “makes clear that veterans are no longer immune from gridlock and political gains,” one aide said, adding this was a “big bill for the community.”
“Republicans blame Democrats, Democrats blame Republicans and veterans are caught in the crossfire,” Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America founder and CEO Paul Rieckhoff said. “Veterans don’t have time for this nonsense.”
And American Legion National Commander Daniel Dellinger said the vote displayed the “same political gamesmanship that led our federal government to a shutdown last fall.”
“There was a right way and a wrong way to vote today, and 41 senators voted the wrong way. That’s inexcusable,” Dellinger said. “I don’t know how anyone who voted no today can look a veteran in the eye and justify that vote.”
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