Andrew Harnik/AP Photo
A Bradley Fighting Vehicle waits in front of the Lincoln Memorial before the 2019 Independence Day ‘Salute to America’ celebration ordered by President Trump.
There are few things President Trump has been more consistent in than his embrace of military might, both at home and abroad. His dramatic expansion of the country’s war-fighting capability stands as one of the few enduring, signature accomplishments of his first term. Under Obama, the largest yearly military budget topped out around $600 billion. Trump ballooned it considerably to its highest total ever, some $740 billion in its latest form.
No less important, though perhaps less headline-grabbing, was Trump’s 2017 expansion of the 1033 program, which provides for the transfer of Defense Department military gear to civilian police departments. Then-Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced this expansion to the crowd at that year’s Fraternal Order of Police convention in Nashville. The 1033 expansion allowed Trump to fuse the imperial presidency with the law-and-order presidency, which has resulted in a startling display of military might, no matter where you look. The rash of high-profile police brutality cases we’ve seen since antiracist protests broke out in late May results in part from this fact: When you have tanks and flashbang grenades and other weaponry piling up, you tend to use it (and American cities, it turns out, represent the rare theater where tear gas isn’t outlawed).
Nearly all congressional Republicans have backed these moves. Congressional Democrats, meanwhile, have condemned creeping militarization, from Trump’s warmongering with Iran to his embrace of paramilitary action in Portland, vocally. They, as the only alternative to Republican militarism, would like you to know that they do not like this at all. Oh, and they definitely do not like Trump!
So one would think, then, that they would be all for reversing the significant post-Obama run-up in military might, and shutting down the military-to-police pipeline. Right on cue, progressives in the House and Senate brought up three separate measures for a vote this week: a Senate amendment to the National Defense Authorization Act to divert 10 percent of the $740 billion military budget to jobs, health care, and education; a House amendment to accomplish effectively the same thing; and a Senate proposal to strongly curtail the 1033 program. The first two proposals came from Bernie Sanders and the Congressional Progressive Caucus, while the third even had bipartisan support.
In less than a week, all three initiatives were downed. Limiting the sale of Department of Defense military gear to local police lost to an intransigent Republican majority, far too strong to overcome the Senate’s 60-vote threshold. But it was a majority of Democrats who joined their Republican colleagues in voting against defense spending cuts, not just in the Senate but also in the House, where Democrats maintain majority control.
It will come as no surprise that cutting defense spending is supported by a significant majority of Democratic voters, so such a proposal hardly amounts to Democratic electeds going out on a limb. In fact, a piddling 10 percent cut to defense spending wouldn’t even return us all the way to Obama-era funding. Thus, rerouting some funding to social services in the midst of a massive economic and public-health crisis could well be called commonsense legislation, with the added bonus of sticking it to Trump, and curtailing his power somewhat as he descends into total disregard for constitutional limits. The case makes itself.
Maybe you think that this gesture would change nothing but draw a Trump veto, risking “anti-troop” charges in the elections. But Trump is already intending to veto the defense bill, because of a provision removing the names of Confederate generals from military bases. So it was a free vote, a way to express disapproval for misplaced priorities.
And yet, in the Senate, only 23 Democrats voted for the Sanders proposal, not even half of the 47 Democrats in the chamber. Among those voting against the amendment were Democratic vice-presidential hopefuls Kamala Harris of California, Tammy Duckworth of Illinois, and Maggie Hassan of New Hampshire. Even progressive stalwart Sherrod Brown of Ohio voted in opposition.
One would think that would be a crushing and shameful blow for the party, again handing Trump exactly what he wants and undercutting their message of uniform opposition to his agenda. But the fact that even 23 Democrats voted for it was so out of character that the Sanders office issued a press release hailing it as a triumph. “Today, almost half of the members of the Senate Democratic Caucus—23 Senators—voted to cut Pentagon spending by 10 percent and invest in human needs. This is far and away the most significant step forward in recent years in addressing our bloated $740 billion military budget and changing our national priorities,” went his statement of defeat with dignity. Even far-from-progressive Chuck Schumer joined the losing side!
Why is it so inconceivable that Democrats would act like Democrats, in the interest of Democratic voters, when it comes to defense?
The story was perhaps even more preposterous in the House. There, the companion amendment, brought by Reps. Mark Pocan (D-WI) and Barbara Lee (D-CA), was blown out by a 93-323 margin, with 92 Democrats voting in support of it, and 139 against, in the chamber they control. Among its opponents were Val Demings of Florida, the former Orlando police chief and another Biden VP contender, as well as party leaders like current DCCC chair Cheri Bustos, third-ranking member Jim Clyburn, and former DNC chair Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Over 20 California Dems, the vast majority in safe blue districts, voted in opposition as well. Across the two chambers, nearly every Biden ally save for Nancy Pelosi voted against the amendment.
And yet, progressive groups, too, hailed that as a triumph. Public Citizen tweeted that “this is the first time in decades that Congress has considered a significant cut to Pentagon spending.” Low expectations are one thing; decisions that make you wonder what exactly is the point of the Democratic Party are another. Rubber-stamping the military agenda of a president recently impeached for his criminally unsavory use of military aid while he clings to a popularity rate in the 30s while in the majority falls squarely into category two.
Need I remind you that local police forces, juiced up with military equipment courtesy of the Department of Defense, are roaming our cities’ streets with paramilitary agents of the Border Patrol and the U.S. Marshals, attacking and detaining Americans for their exercise of constitutionally protected rights, with outright disregard for the nation’s charter? And yet the political force tasked with opposing Trump couldn’t manage to roll back his nearly infinite war chest by a skinny 10 percent during a recession.
Instead, they decided to vote against the wishes of their own voters, who by a 32 percent margin supported the Sanders and Pocan amendments, even more resounding than their support for ending 1033 (a Republican resolution that requires police forces receiving DOD equipment to “respect” the Constitution later sailed through with 90 votes). And the fact that some progressives managed to break ranks was so surprising, it was cause for celebration. I guess it is better than when, in 2018, every single Senate Democrat other than Bernie Sanders decided that Trump’s military budget actually wasn’t big enough.
Why is it so inconceivable that Democrats would act like Democrats, in the interest of Democratic voters, when it comes to defense? The near-uniformity of Democratic leadership on voting for the Republican position here confounds. But the fact that Pelosi and Schumer were willing to side with progressives begs another question: Where was Joe Biden on this?
If Democrats are going to enact anything that resembles their own agenda, they’re going to have to aim way higher than cutting defense to near Obama-era highs. Taking military spending not to pre-Trump but to pre-9/11 levels should be a starting point. Democratic voters abhor the War on Terror; it’s what helped deliver Obama the presidency back in 2008. It’s incumbent on Joe Biden to deliver on that preference, not just to end engagements in Iraq and Afghanistan but to bring an end to the bloated defense budgets of the War on Terror era. His silence on the proposal even in the thick of a campaign against Trump sends a troubling message.
It looks very likely that voters, come November, are going to heed the call of Democrats, and put them in control of two or possibly even three branches of government, with the charge of undoing what Trump has done. That’s going to require them to, in the words of New York magazine’s Eric Levitz, “move in the direction of Western European levels of military spending.” That’s going to require putting an end to the deranged conventional wisdom on defense spending. What goes up must eventually come down. If they don’t, the rightward shift of the Trump years will simply become standard. And if they’re afraid to do it now, it’s unclear why voters should expect them to have the courage to do it later.
