House approves Pentagon funds, holds fire on Iraq
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The House of Representatives early on Sunday approved more money for the Pentagon but not the unpopular Iraq war, which is expected to be the subject of a major legislative clash this fall.
The defense appropriations bill passed by the House 395-13 provides $459.6 billion for the Pentagon for the fiscal year starting October 1, and maps out spending priorities.
The Senate has already left Washington for an August recess, and is not scheduled to vote on the defense spending bill until the autumn.
The House version pays for everything from new ships and more soldiers to a 3.5 percent pay raise for the military -- half a percentage point more than the Pentagon sought.
It does not include an extra $147 billion in Iraq war funds that the Bush administration wants Congress to approve this autumn, around the time U.S. Iraq commander Gen. David Petraeus reports to lawmakers on the war. Over $600 billion in war checks have already been written for Iraq and Afghanistan.
The Democrat-majority House has voted three times this year for timetables to end U.S. involvement in Iraq, and initially some lawmakers wanted to append pullout proposals to the Pentagon spending blueprint.
But they backed down after Democratic leaders decided to hold their fire on Iraq until September.
The House did challenge Bush's conduct of the Iraq war with one vote earlier in the week, requiring U.S. troops get more leave at home between deployments to Iraq. Bush has threatened to veto that measure, and its future is unclear in the Senate.
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The Pentagon spending blueprint approved on Sunday is $3.5 billion less than Bush requested. The White House has criticized many provisions but stopped short of a veto threat.
The bill strikes $139 million from a missile defense project the Bush administration plans for Eastern Europe. House aides said the cut would prevent construction on a missile interceptor site in Poland, the most controversial part of the project, which has angered the Russian government.
The spending bill provides funding for an additional 7,000 Army soldiers -- bringing the total to 489,000 -- and 5,000 Marines, raising them to 180,000. It also provides for improved health care for soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
It was one of the last bills lawmakers approved in a late-night session before joining the Senate on recess, and followed days of partisan bickering over House rules, exacerbated by little sleep.
Before the vote, several lawmakers sought unsuccessfully to strike some of the many "earmarks" -- pet projects that benefit lawmakers' home districts -- from the defense bill.
"This bill has more than 1,300 earmarks. The notion that these had proper review is simply not reasonable," declared Rep. Jeff Flake, an Arizona Republican.
One earmark he sought to cut provides $2.5 million to restore a military parade ground in San Francisco, represented by House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. It stayed in the bill.
Flake challenged Rep. John Murtha, chairman of the House defense spending panel, to explain the process for awarding earmarks. A watchdog group, Taxpayers for Common Sense, said recently that Pennsylvania Democrat Murtha had sponsored more than $150 million worth of earmarks in the legislation.
"We try to vet them the best we can," Murtha replied. "I don't make apologies for having earmarks ... Less than one percent of the $459 billion budget was projects for members of Congress, and I think members of Congress know as well as the bureaucracy over in the White House what has to be done."
