McCarthy not on board for defense supplemental championed by Senate GOP

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House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), fresh off of securing a debt limit deal averting an economic crisis, said he wouldn’t support a supplemental defense bill Senate Republicans have pushed to increase funding for Ukraine and get around limits to the Pentagon budget. The supplemental is “not going anywhere” in the House, McCarthy told Punchbowl News.

Senate defense hawks strongly criticized the debt limit deal brokered by McCarthy and President Joe Biden for capping defense spending in fiscal 2024 at $886 billion, a roughly 3% increase from current levels, and capping fiscal 2025 defense spending at $895 billion, a 1% increase. The senators also viewed the defense caps adjusted for inflation as a defense cut that could hurt the nation’s efforts to curb aggression from China or Russia.

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Led by Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC), several Republican senators publicly called for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) to bring a supplemental defense bill to the Senate floor in order to gain their support for the debt limit deal. Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) entered a joint statement into the congressional record stating the debt limit couldn’t block future emergency supplemental funding, such as more Ukraine aid.

“This debt ceiling deal does nothing to limit the Senate’s ability to appropriate emergency supplemental funds to ensure our military capabilities are sufficient to deter China, Russia, and our other adversaries,” Schumer also said on the Senate floor. The Fiscal Responsibility Act eventually passed in the Senate last week, leading to Biden signing the legislation into law.

But McCarthy isn’t sold that increasing defense spending should be done through a supplemental measure.

“I’m not going to pre-judge what some of them [in the Senate] do, but if they think they’re writing a supplemental because they want to go around an agreement we just made, it’s not going anywhere,” McCarthy elaborated.

McCarthy is pushing for any more Ukraine funding to come through the annual appropriations process. “You first have to show, what do you need money for?” McCarthy added. “We’ve got an approps process. We’re just going to work through an approps process. They’re not going to circumvent what we’re doing here.”

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It could lead to awkward Senate-House GOP tensions over Ukraine and Pentagon funding, an issue that Republicans have generally pushed for.

Graham called McCarthy’s remarks a “shame.”

“The speaker will never convince me that 2% below actual inflation is fully funding the Defense Department. … That cannot be the position of the Republican Party without some contest here,” Graham said.

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