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A divided House voted on Thursday to overturn a Pentagon policy guaranteeing abortion access to service members regardless of where they are stationed and to bar health services for transgender military personnel, imperiling passage of the annual defense bill as right-wing lawmakers rallied Republicans around their drive to load the measure with conservative policy dictates.
The vote was 221 to 213, nearly along party lines, to attach the abortion proposal to the bill, with Republicans propelling it to passage over near-unanimous Democratic opposition. It was one of a series of controversial amendments that hard-right lawmakers demanded be put on the floor as a condition for allowing the legislation to move forward.
By a vote of 222 to 211, the House also adopted a measure to bar the military’s health plan from covering gender-transition surgeries — which currently can be covered only with a waiver — and gender-affirming hormone therapy.
Democrats condemned the moves, with some warning on Thursday that they could not support the defense bill with the abortion restriction included.
“The MAGA majority is using our defense bill to get one stop closer to the only thing they really care about: a nationwide abortion ban,” Representative Katherine M. Clark of Massachusetts, the Democratic whip, said in a floor speech.
Democratic support is seen as crucial for passing the defense bill in the narrowly split House, where Republicans have only a slim majority. The $886 billion measure would grant a 5.2 percent pay raise to military personnel, counter aggressive moves by China and Russia, and establish a special inspector general to oversee U.S. aid to Ukraine
But on Thursday, Democrats called the abortion measure unacceptable in the wake of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year overturning abortion rights, which set off a rush by some states to enact bans and curbs on the procedure. Representative Mikie Sherrill, Democrat of New Jersey and a Navy veteran, said the Republican provision “puts servicewomen and military families’ lives at risk by denying the basic right to travel for health care no longer available where they are stationed.”
Republicans defended the move as a matter of principle, arguing that the Pentagon policy it would overturn — offering time off and travel reimbursement to troops traveling out of state to obtain an abortion — violated a prohibition against taxpayer-funded abortions.
“This illegal Biden-endorsed policy has no place in our military,” said Representative Ronny Jackson, Republican of Texas, the author of the proposal. “The taxpayer money is going directly to support abortions, and anyone in this chamber that says differently is blatantly lying to the American people.”
The debate unfolded after Speaker Kevin McCarthy capitulated this week to a small group of ultraconservative Republicans who had threatened to block the defense legislation if their proposals, including pulling U.S. aid to Ukraine, did not receive consideration.
Instead the House moved forward on Thursday, slogging through dozens of proposed modifications with the fate of the bill still in doubt. It overwhelmingly defeated two Republican efforts to cut U.S. military assistance for Ukraine. The vote was 341 to 89 to reject a measure from Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, Republican of Georgia, to end a $300 million program to train and equip Ukrainian soldiers, which has been in place for almost a decade. And by a vote of 358 to 70, the House rejected a proposal from Representative Matt Gaetz, Republican of Florida, to prohibit sending any more security assistance to Ukraine. In both cases, the supporters were all Republicans.
Those results were a victory for mainstream Republicans, who have defended U.S. military assistance to Ukraine as vital to countering Russia and are expected to support the Biden administration when it approaches Congress to approve additional money for Ukraine, likely this fall. But they reflected how anti-Ukraine sentiment is growing in the Republican ranks. In the spring, only 57 Republicans voted against a $40 billion package of military and humanitarian assistance for Ukraine.
In hours of floor debate on Thursday, Republicans made the case for attaching an array of social policy dictates to the defense legislation, arguing that they were working to thwart a bid by the Biden administration to inject its progressive vision into every area of government, including the Pentagon.
“It is this administration that has turned the Department of Defense into a social-engineering experiment wrapped in a uniform,” Representative Chip Roy, Republican of Texas, said on the floor. “The American people I’ve talked to back home don’t want a weak military; they don’t want a woke military; they don’t want rainbow propaganda on bases; they don’t want to pay for troops’ sex changes.”
Though defense bill debates have often been a forum for partisan policy fights, the debate in the House has been particularly nasty, exposing Republican divisions and threatening the customary bipartisan consensus around the legislation. The measures Republicans have proposed stand no chance of passing the Democratic-led Senate, and a protracted fight over the measure could imperil its chance of enactment.
Republicans “managed to mess up a bipartisan bill and put it on a path to becoming a hyperpartisan one by loading up with every divisive social issue under the sun,” said Representative Jim McGovern of Massachusetts, the senior Democrat on the Rules Committee, accusing G.O.P. leaders of catering to “a dozen or so far-right MAGA wing nuts.”
Republican leaders, who can afford to lose no more than four votes on their side if Democrats remain united in opposition, had been counting on Democratic votes to help pass the defense bill. The demands of hard-right lawmakers to load the bill with a deeply conservative cultural agenda could cost them those critical votes.
They have also alienated some mainstream Republicans, including those from politically competitive districts. Representative Don Bacon, Republican of Nebraska, said in an interview on Thursday that he would oppose an across-the-board cut to diversity training.
“You’ve got to have basic training on our core values, which is: We don’t like racists in the military. We don’t like antisemites in the military. We don’t like sexists in the military,” he said.
But Mr. Bacon said he backed the proposal to undo the Pentagon’s policy on abortion access and the one to deny coverage for gender-transition procedures, saying: “If you want to do it, do it on your own dime.”
While Republicans failed in several efforts to cut back assistance to Ukraine, it was not clear whether a proposal to bar the Biden administration from sending cluster munitions to Kyiv, as the president announced he intended to do last week, would suffer a similar fate.
Republican leaders have been agitating for cluster munitions to be sent to Ukraine for months, while most Democrats were outraged at President Biden’s decision. They argued that the unwieldy warheads — which scatter upon impact and routinely leave unexploded ordnance in the ground, endangering civilians for decades to come — would cost the United States the moral high ground in the war.
This week, a number of conservative Republicans aligned themselves with the Democrats opposing the move. The House was set to debate it later Thursday night.
Annie Karni contributed reporting.
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Karoun Demirjian
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