Although the Senate’s version of the fiscal 2017 energy and water budget remains mired in procedural partisan gridlock, lawmakers on Monday inched closer to a solution that could shear a controversial amendment off the otherwise bipartisan proposal and clear the way for a vote in the coming weeks.
While senators returning to Washington from a weeklong recess failed for a third time to end debate on the $37.5 billion Energy and Water Appropriations Act that includes DOE’s budget for the next fiscal year, rhetoric on both sides of the aisle softened Monday as Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) opened the door to a possible compromise Democrats have at least not rejected outright.
That possible solution: a Wednesday afternoon vote to end debate on a controversial amendment authored by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) that would block DOE from using its 2017 appropriations to buy Iranian heavy water. Heavy water can be used to make plutonium.
If the Wednesday vote succeeds, senators would be forced to vote on the Cotton amendment itself. And in an apparent overture to Democrats who oppose the amendment as an attack on the U.S.-backed nuclear deal with Iran, DOE’s chief Senate appropriator, Sen. Lamar Alexander (R-Tenn.), said he would vote against his Republican colleague’s amendment.
“In my view, respectfully, this is bad policy,” Alexander said on the floor Monday. “I oppose it. I support the senator’s right to have a vote, and he will have a vote. And when we have that vote, I will vote ‘no.’”
Alexander said the U.S. should buy Tehran’s heavy water to keep it away from nations such as North Korea, which might use it to make a nuclear bomb.
Senate Democrats have been loathe even to vote on the amendment, which in light of a White House veto threat they consider a blatantly partisan poison-pill rider. Yet Monday, Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.), ranking member on the Senate Appropriations energy and water subcommittee Alexander chairs, at least did not outright refuse to consider such a vote.
After Democrats effectively filibustered the spending bill for the third time, and after McConnell called for a vote to end debate on the controversial amendment, Feinstein thanked Alexander for “his very constructive actions,” and said that “now that we can wait until Wednesday an hour after we come in for the vote, and we’ll see what the will of the Senate is.”
Added Feinstein, “This is enabling us to pass the bill and see it enacted into law, we hope.”