The House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee cleared its portion of the Fiscal Year 2015 National Defense Authorization Act in a tidy 8 minutes and 45 seconds yesterday, but not without some grumbling from several Democrats on the panel. Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.) was the lone “no” vote against the markup as he questioned why the Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility wasn’t in the subcommittee’s jurisdiction—it and other National Nuclear Security Administration nonproliferation work are not part of the Strategic Forces portion of the bil and are handled at the full committee level—and he suggested there should be more debate on various issues at the subcommittee level. “To my knowledge this isn’t the railroad committee, and we really ought to be dealing with these issues,” Garamendi said, later adding: “There are issues about the NNSA plutonium stockpile, there are issues about whether we ought to be rebuilding, maintaining or building new facilities for the production of plutonium pits when we have some 43 tons of them lying around. I don’t know. It seems to me these are things we ought to be discussing.”
Garamendi was only following the lead of Ranking Member Jim Cooper (D-Tenn.), who derided the “amendment-fest” that is likely to occur when the full committee marks up the bill May 7. “I hope that next year perhaps we can stop the practice of really having no substantive discussion at the subcommittee mark level,” Cooper said. “We kick all our problems upstairs to the full committee and that makes that process a horrendous one-day ordeal with oftentimes very little expertise.” Cooper said because the strategic forces expertise resides on the subcommittee, the subcommittee should be the venue for amendments. “I think we can do a lot better in this vitally important area if we reserved more of the real decision-making for this level and then we present to the HASC a more completed, consensus product instead of the usual amendment-fest. … This is important work for Congress to do. We’ve got to get it right.”
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