National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014

Floor Speech

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Mr. LEVIN. Mr. President, before we left for the Thanksgiving break, Senator Inhofe and I said we would come to the Senate floor today to update Members on the status of the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2014.

Before the break we spent a week on the Senate floor trying to bring more amendments up and to have them debated and voted on, but we were unable to do so. We tried to reach agreement to limit consideration to defense-related amendments, but we were unable to do that. We tried to get consent to vote on two sexual assault amendments--the Gillibrand amendment and the McCaskill amendment--that had been fully debated, but we could not get that consent. We tried to get consent to lock in additional amendments for votes and to move a package of cleared amendments, but we were unable to do so.

At this point, the House of Representatives will be adjourning for the year at the end of this week, and there is simply no way we can debate and vote on those amendments to the pending bill, get cloture, pass the bill, go to conference with the House, get a conference report written, and have it adopted by the House of Representatives all before the House goes out of session this Friday. There simply is no way all of those events can take place to get a defense bill passed.

So Senator Inhofe and I believe it is our responsibility to the Armed Services Committee, to the Senate, to our men and women in uniform, and to the country to do everything we can to enact a defense authorization bill. For this reason, we are taking the same approach we took when we were unable to finish the bill and go to conference with the House in 2008 and 2010. What we did is we sat down with our counterparts on the House side--in this case, chairman Buck McKeon and ranking member Adam Smith of the House Armed Services Committee--and we set our staffs to work to come up with a bill that would have a chance of getting passed by both Houses.

The four of us have reached agreement on a bill that we hope will be passed by the House before it recesses this Friday and, if it does, then be considered by the Senate next week.

We worked hard to blend the bill that was overwhelmingly voted out of the Senate Armed Services Committee with the bill that was overwhelmingly approved by the House of Representatives. We have worked, as we always do, on the SAS Committee on a bipartisan basis.

We took into consideration as many proposed Senate amendments as we could. We focused on amendments that had been cleared on the Senate side when the bill was being debated in the Senate. We approached these amendments and others in much the same manner as we did provisions that were in the bill, working to come up with language, wherever possible, that could be accepted on the Democratic and Republican sides in both the Senate and the House.

The bill we have come up with is not a Democratic bill or a Republican bill. It is a bipartisan defense bill, one that serves the interests of our men and women in uniform and preserves the important principle of congressional oversight over the Pentagon. Here are some examples of what will be in the bill that will be considered by the House later this week and then hopefully by the Senate next week.

The bill will extend the authority of the Department of Defense to pay combat pay and hardship duty pay for our troops. The bill, relative to Guantanamo, includes that part of the Senate language easing restrictions on overseas transfers of Gitmo detainees, but it retains the House prohibitions on transferring detainees to the United States.

Although we were unable to consider the Gillibrand and McCaskill amendments on the Senate floor or in the bill itself that will be forthcoming, the bill includes more than 20 other provisions to address the problem of sexual assault in the military that were in the Senate bill that came to the floor out of the committee and that were in the House of Representatives bill as well.

These provisions include the following: They provide a special victims' counsel for survivors of sexual assault, make retaliation for reporting a sexual assault a crime under the Uniform Code of Military Justice. The provisions require commanders to immediately refer all allegations of sexual assault to professional criminal investigators. They would end the commanders' ability to modify findings and convictions for sexual assaults, and would require higher level review of any decision not to prosecute allegations of sexual assault.

The bill will do the following that will be hopefully coming here next week: Make the Article 32 process more like a grand jury proceeding. Under the UCMJ, the Uniform Code of Military Justice, currently the proceeding that is taken under Article 32 is more like a discovery proceeding rather than a grand jury proceeding, and it has created all kinds of problems, including for victims of sexual assault who would have to appear and be subject to cross-examination by the defense.

This bill will extend supplemental impact aid to help local school districts educate military children. The bill will extend existing military land withdrawals in a number of places that would otherwise expire, leaving the military without critical testing and training capabilities. The bill includes a new land withdrawal to enable the Marine Corps to expand its training area at 29 Palms.

The bill provides needed funding authority for the destruction of the Syrian chemical weapons stockpile and for efforts of the Jordanian Armed Forces to secure that country's border with Syria.

Earlier today GEN Martin Dempsey, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote a letter to the leadership of the Senate and the House of Representatives in which he strongly urges completion of action on the National Defense Authorization Act this year. General Dempsey's letter provides a long list of essential authorities that will lapse if this bill is not enacted. This is just one paragraph from his letter:
The authorities contained [in the National Defense Authorization Act] are critical to the Nation's defense and urgently needed to ensure we all keep faith with the men and women, military and civilian, selflessly serving in our Armed Forces.

Mr. President, I ask unanimous consent that General Dempsey's letter, with that attachment, be printed in the Record.

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Mr. LEVIN. We have not failed to pass a National Defense Authorization Act for 52 years even when, as I mentioned, in a couple cases in recent years the final bill was the result of a process like we have had to follow with this year's authorization bill.

This is not the best way to proceed, but our troops and their families and our Nation's security deserve a defense bill, and this is the only practical way to get a defense bill done this year. There is no other way, because, as I indicated before, the House of Representatives is--we could not get a bill done before the end of this week if we brought back the bill that was pending before Thanksgiving. There is no way we can do it. And the experience in the week before the Thanksgiving recess demonstrated pretty clearly there is no way we could get a defense bill, such as the one that was pending, passed in this body before the end of this week.

The problem is that the House of Representatives is done at the end of this week. If we use the pending bill that was previously pending as the vehicle, we cannot possibly get to a conference, get an agreement on a conference, get a conference report, go back to the House of Representatives, and then get a conference report here, because the House of Representatives is done on Friday.

This is the only path to a bill. We have not missed in 52 years, and the reason we do not miss is our troops and their families and the national security of this country. That is why we have not failed. We cannot fail this year. The only practical way to avoid failure is if we follow the course which Senator Inhofe and I are now proposing to this body. Again, it is not the preferred course. It just happens to be the only course.

I thank Senator Inhofe and all the members of our committee for the way they have worked on this bill for now almost a whole year and for the final product, which I believe will have the full committee support or at least almost all of us. There were only three members of our committee who did not vote for the bill that came to the floor before.

I yield the floor.

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Mr. LEVIN. The point of the Senator from Arizona is extremely well taken. There is, relevant to his point, a list of expiring authorities which we have just received from the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Dempsey. I put that letter in the Record; we got it literally a few hours ago--listing some of the expiring authorities, including a number that the Senator mentioned and----

Mr. McCAIN. Would the chairman mention a couple of those?

Mr. LEVIN. Special pay and bonuses, combat pay, travel and transportation allowances, nonconventional assisted recovery capability, the authorities to do MILCON, which were mentioned by the Senator from Oklahoma. It is a long list. There will be a real chasm if we don't do this this year. You cannot just say: Well, it will go to next year. Senator Inhofe pointed out, I believe, that in one or two cases where it actually did get signed in the year after the bill was passed, it was because there was a veto by a President and the veto override took place, I believe, in the weeks after January.

But these expiring authorities are very serious. We are going to tell men and women in combat that there is a gap in their combat pay? We don't know for sure that it will ever be filled. This is what General Dempsey mentioned in his letter. He said: Allowing the bill to slip to January adds yet more uncertainty to the force and further complicates the duty of our commanders who face shifting global threats. I also fear that delay may put the entire bill at risk, protracting this uncertainty and impacting our global influence.

Then he gave us a list of the expiring authorities.

So the Senator from Arizona raises a very critical issue. Now, it is not desirable for us to pass a bill as we have. But with the help of the Senator from Arizona when he was the ranking member, we were able, on two occasions, in a situation where there were objections to amendments being offered on the Senate floor--I will not go into all the details, but 2 of the last 5 years we were put in a position where we could not get the usual course followed, where the bill had a full amendment process on the Senate floor--it had some, as this bill has, but not enough time. Then we ran into that wall, and we were able to work out a bipartisan resolution to present to the Senate, sort of a virtual conference report--not technically a conference report but a bill, a fresh bill, a new bill which merged and blended the bill that passed the Senate Armed Services Committee in those 2 years with the bill that passed the House of Representatives. We then on a bipartisan basis presented those two bills to the Senate, and they were passed.

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Mr. LEVIN. The Senator points out the reality, which is what is likely to happen in January. There is another reality that what will happen in January is it will be very difficult to get to this bill because of the crushing business of CRs and other crushing business in January, even if we meet in January.

The shortest answer I could give to my friend from Arizona is the following: I am in combat. I am in combat somewhere in the world and I am going to read: Combat pay stops on December 31.

There are dozens of these kinds of authorizations that are listed in General Dempsey's letter, dozens of them, that just stop on December 31. Take only that one. Think about that and what kind of an impression we are giving to our men and women who are in combat, in harm's way, when they read: Combat pay stops.

Yes, maybe it will be extended in January or in February, but that is actually unsatisfactory. It will be outrageous for us not to pass this bill.

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Mr. LEVIN. I thank the Senator from Arizona for everything he has been doing for so many decades for this country, including our committee. It is invaluable. We are going to get this bill passed. That is our determination.

It will be a shock to every American if we are unable to pass the Defense authorization bill. It will be totally intolerable. I know Senator Inhofe and I will help Senator McCain and others get this bill done this year.

I yield the floor.

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