Pentagon budget faces shutdown threat as Democrats target midterms

Extraordinarily gifted legislators in the United States Senate are rare. As preconditions to their effectiveness they must accumulate both significant seniority in the body of 100, and the respect of their ever changing 99 colleagues. It’s a small club — the United States Senate — and everyone knows who has got the ability and the respect to guide big lifts through the (intentionally) complicated process.

Maine’s Senator Susan Collins is one of the handful of senators who command the respect of her Republican Conference colleagues and most of the Democratic senators who actually care about making the country run well. That is why Collins is the Chair of the powerful Senate Appropriations Committee and is also one of the 17 senators on the critical Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. (Collins is also a member of the Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions.)

As chair of the Appropriations Committee, Collins has a unique power to guide the country’s spending. In partnership with the Chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee (“SASC”) Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), Collins’ greatest responsibility as a legislator is to assure the American military is fully funded to the level necessary to “provide for the common defense” as the Preamble of the Constitution succinctly puts it.

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Collins long ago earned a reputation as a Senate “workhorse,” and her 10,000th consecutive Senate roll call vote — extending the unbroken voting streak she began in 1997 — made her the first Senator in U.S. history to have cast this many votes without ever missing one. Even as Joe DiMaggio’s 1941 run of hits in 56 consecutive games is regarded as untouchable, so is Collins’ remarkable milestone (which towers higher with every roll call vote she makes.)

All of that experience and all of that earned respect will be needed in the weeks and months immediately ahead as Collins, along with Wicker and the Senate GOP leadership, tackle perhaps the most difficult challenge of her already distinguished and widely admired career: Allocating the funds needed to modernize the Pentagon in an era of rapidly changing technology when it comes to war and intelligence gathering, both the visible markers of American power like ships, submarines and the new B-21 bombers which provide the nation with deterrence and the secret and extraordinarily sensitive virtual stockpiles of cyber strength. Collins must do this even as hyper-partisanship engulfs the country’s politics.

Collins faces the urgent need to thread this extremely partisan era which is defined by negative polarization and rhetorical extremism of both the far left and far right. The nation requires a steady and effective set of military appropriation bills that will keep the nation’s defenses funded for the immediate demands of the conflict with Iran, even as the United States must continue to define and meet the challenge posed by the aggressive plans of China’s iron-fisted Leninist dictator Xi Jinping.

That Collins is leading in this moment of peril is very fortunate for the country. That she has to do so in what is for her an election year against a self-described “communist” and wildly extremist radical from the fringe of the Democrat’s far left edge is a new challenge.

Graham Platner was nominated by the Democrats because he is a human wrecking ball. By nominating the very opposite of Collins when it comes to achievement and temperament, the radical wing of the Democrats hope to cripple the Senate by denying it one of its most effective members. They are asking Mainers to destroy their own state’s vast advantage in the Congress in the service of their anti-West, anti-American, anti-Israel and antisemitic agenda.

They are also aiming to deeply injure the process that defends America at this crucial moment.

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The House and Senate must soon decide how to proceed on the Pentagon’s budget for 2027 and beyond. Both the SASC and the Senate Appropriations Committee must act. SASC provide the defense spending architecture via the National Defense Authorization Act (“NDAA”), but as the Wall Street Journal noted this past weekend the NDAA “is a policy guide not a check, and the big question is whether the President’s $1.5 trillion defense budget” will actually pass and in what form and via what process.

Genuine legislators like Collins would prefer to use “regular order” to hold hearings, conduct mark-ups and send proposed bills to House-Senate conference committees. That is the ideal. That ideal is doomed to fail this year as Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, assailed by his party’s radicals, is intent on creating a government shutdown before the midterms.

That shutdown isn’t a prophecy or a dart thrown with a blindfold. It’s the inevitable result of how the Democrats have framed the midterm elections this fall. Schumer cannot stop the House from enacting a defense budget but he can and will make the Senate’s regular order grind to a halt in order to satisfy his party’s whacko left-wing with a shutdown.

Which puts Collins and every Republican who is serious about keeping our military strong in a bind. The military must be as equipped and prepared in an era of rapidly evolving threats and technology. It cannot lurch from “Continuing Resolution” to “Continuing Resolution” (“CR”) which is the best result of “shutdown politics.”

Democrats intend that very result. And if the Democrats win either or both Houses back from the Republicans in the fall, they will go much farther than a long string of CRs. They will savage defense spending in favor of their socialist pipe dreams.

This isn’t a secret and it’s not doom-casting. Believe what Democrats tell you. The party has launched off the left cliff in American politics, heading to places no American party has ever proposed to go before much less actually travelled towards.

The left is now opposed to American power and stature in the world. It would strip us of our defenses. Even the handful of crazed leftists nominated for the House by Democrats in New Jersey and New York in recent weeks would combine with the existing fringe — the “Squad” — to eviscerate American military strength. Even five radical House members will be enough to control defense spending in a closely divided House and only one or two senators can do so in an even or one-vote majority Senate. The Congress ahead is very likely to be the most radical in America’s 250 years.

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Which is why Collins and Wicker, along with Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD), Senate Budget Chairman Lindsey Graham (R-SC) and Senate Intelligence Chairman Tom Cotton (R-AR) must make the anti-institutionalist choice to fund the Pentagon via the “budget reconciliation process,” a complicated and controversial means to the end of tackling major tax and spending bills like the Working Families Tax Cut of 2025 and various COVID relief bills of both Republican and Democratic presidents. (Collins and then Senator Marco Rubio led the crafting of the Paycheck Protection Program which was the critical part of the economy-saving CARES Act of March 2020.)

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Because Democrats are going hold the federal government hostage in the fall as a giant campaign stunt, it falls to the serious and sober-minded Republican senators to advance national security spending through reconciliation. The harder question is whether to do so for two or three years instead of just one. That’s a difficult choice to make because it would recognize the yawning chasm between the mainstream American consensus about the country’s defenses and the hard left’s “defund defense” corollary to its “defund the police” and “defund ICE” platform planks.

Using reconciliation to forward fund up to 5 trillion dollars is nobody’s ideal. But it is a necessity to provide time for our troops until the Democrats’ collective fever breaks.

Hugh Hewitt is a Fox News contributor and host of “The Hugh Hewitt Show” heard weekday afternoons from 3 PM to 6 PM ET on the Salem Radio Network, and simulcast on Salem News Channel. Hugh drives Americans home on the East Coast and to lunch on the West Coast on over 400 affiliates nationwide, and on all the streaming platforms where SNC can be seen. He is a frequent guest on the Fox News Channel’s news roundtable, hosted by Bret Baier weekdays at 6pm ET. A son of Ohio and a graduate of Harvard College and the University of Michigan Law School, Hewitt has been a Professor of Law at Chapman University’s Fowler School of Law since 1996 where he teaches Constitutional Law. Hewitt launched his eponymous radio show from Los Angeles in 1990. Hewitt has frequently appeared on every major national news television network, hosted television shows for PBS and MSNBC, written for every major American paper, has authored a dozen books and moderated a score of Republican candidate debates, most recently the November 2023 Republican presidential debate in Miami and four Republican presidential debates in the 2015-16 cycle. Hewitt focuses his radio show and his column on the Constitution, national security, American politics and the Cleveland Browns and Guardians. Hewitt has interviewed tens of thousands of guests from Democrats Hillary Clinton and John Kerry to Republican Presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump over his 40 years in broadcasting. This column previews the lead story that will drive his radio/ TV show today.

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