D.C. Dispatch: What N.J.’s members of Congress did in Washington this week

This week marked the final week of congressional activity before the August recess; starting today, New Jersey’s representatives will be back in their home state for more than a month.

But before they left, both chambers took up several important pieces of legislation, including a Veterans Affairs funding bill in the House and the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) in the Senate. Here’s some of what New Jersey’s 14 members of Congress did this week.

The government can have a little funding, as as treat

Eventually, the House will need to approve 12 appropriations bills for various sectors of the federal government. But with the August recess now begun, they’ve only passed one: the Military Construction, Veterans Affairs, and Related Agencies Appropriations Act, which principally funds the Department of Veterans’ Affairs.

Normally, the bill is the easiest of the 12 appropriations bills to get through. But thanks to a number of conservative provisions related to abortion, transgender health care, and other controversial issues, House Democrats – among them New Jersey’s nine Democrats – were unanimously opposed, and the bill passed by a narrow 219-211 margin.

Rep. Andy Kim (D-Moorestown), likely echoing the rest of the Democratic caucus, told the New Jersey Globe that he would have liked to support the bill, but Republican amendments made it impossible for him to do so.

“If ever there’s a place we can find bipartisan agreement, it’d be on supporting our military and our veterans,” Kim said. “But instead of just focusing on military issues and our veterans’ issues, it’s just loaded up with all this culture war stuff.”

Perhaps the most notable Democratic “no” vote came from Rep. Josh Gottheimer (D-Wyckoff), given that he had three of his own amendments successfully added to the bill. Gottheimer-led amendments combating antisemitism, increasing communication with veterans about benefits available to them, and funding programs for veterans transitioning back to civilian life were all included in the bill – but he voted against it anyways.

Republicans, of course, had a different take on the proceedings. In a statement, Rep. Chris Smith (R-Manchester) defended the amendments relating to abortions and “critical race theory,” saying that the focus of the VA should be exclusively on veterans’ well-being.

“The needs of those who have put their lives on the line to protect our freedoms must come first,” Smith said. “We cannot abandon our American heroes in their time of need.”

As for the other 11 appropriations bills, including an Agriculture Department bill that was tentatively scheduled to come up this week, votes will have to wait until Congress returns in September. Once they pass, assuming that those bills take a similar conservative tack as today’s VA bill, there will likely have to be quite a bit of negotiation with the Democratic-controlled Senate and with President Joe Biden.

“A lot of Republicans on the Senate side, I’ve seen say things that show they don’t necessarily agree with this ultra-radical approach we’re seeing with the House Republicans,” Kim said. “Hopefully we’re going to see cooler heads prevail on the other side of the Capitol.”

Speaking of that other side of the Capitol…

Two weeks after the House passed the NDAA, the annual must-pass defense funding bill, the Senate approved its own version of the bill last night. But while the bill passed on a resoundingly bipartisan 86-11 vote, New Jersey’s two senators actually split from one another, with Senator Cory Booker voting no.

Booker said that he supported many of the NDAA’s elements, including a pay raise for servicemembers and continued funding for Ukraine. But he took issue with the bill’s increase in spending, which he said should have come with stronger oversight provisions, as well as a provision in the bill eroding the Pentagon’s diversity, equity and inclusion programs.

“There is a better way to support our troops and protect our national security than continuing a pattern of annually increasing the Pentagon’s budget beyond what the Department of Defense requests and without completing a comprehensive audit to reduce existing levels of financial waste and mismanagement,” Booker said. “Furthermore, it defies common sense that this legislation would limit the department’s ability to promote greater diversity in its ranks, particularly in senior positions in the military, when our enlisted force is increasingly diverse.”

“We must do better in delivering a defense authorization bill that responsibly protects and promotes the United States’ interests and values,” he concluded.

Senator Bob Menendez, on the other hand, enthusiastically voted yes, highlighting his amendment to reauthorize the Firefighter Cancer Registry and the bill’s inclusion of a number of his priorities as the Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman.

“As a Member of Congress, we have a sacred responsibility to support our troops, keep our communities safe, and invest in our national security,” he said in a statement. “I thank partners from both sides of the aisle for supporting many of my priorities in this historic legislation and for helping safeguard Americans in New Jersey and all across the nation.”

But as Kim noted, the process is still far from over. Thanks to the House’s conservative amendments, the two versions of the NDAA are essentially incompatible with one another, and a clash is likely coming after the August recess over how to reconcile their differences.

One-seat ridin’ dirty

When Tom Kean wants to take a train from Westfield into New York City, he, like his constituents, typically has to endure a two-part ride. First, he’ll take the Raritan Valley Line to Newark Penn Station; there, he’ll have to transfer to a different train to take him the rest of the way.

The first bill Kean introduced when he got to Congress was aimed at changing that, and today that bill came up for a committee vote. The “One Seat Ride Act,” which directs the Department of Transportation to study the costs and benefits of eliminating unavoidable transfers on commuter rail lines, cleared the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee yesterday on a 56-3 vote.

“We are now one step closer to paving the way for a more connected and efficient future, where commuters can travel seamlessly both east and westbound,” Kean said in a statement. “For New Jerseyans, this means more time at home and less time commuting.”

The widely bipartisan vote is a promising sign for the bill, which is cosponsored by Kean’s neighbor, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-Ewing). But even if the bill does eventually pass Congress and get signed into law, the study itself wouldn’t be complete for nine months, so Raritan Valley Line commuters will likely have to wait a while longer for a one-seat ride.

Thumping Tuberville

Alongside three fellow national security-focused Democratic congresswomen, Rep. Mikie Sherrill (D-Montclair) was featured in a VoteVets ad this week slamming Senator Tommy Tuberville (R-Alabama) for his lengthy blockade of senior military promotions in the Senate.

For months, Tuberville has prevented the Senate from moving forward on hundreds of military promotions, in what is meant as a protest of the Department of Defense’s policy of helping servicemembers and military families in states with abortion bans travel to other states for abortion services.

“When I joined the Navy, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution, just like the hundreds of thousands of women serving in uniform right now,” Sherrill says in the ad. “We fought too hard for our rights and freedoms to let extremist politicians, who never served themselves, take them away.”

Sherrill has previously made legislative attempts to address Tuberville’s obstruction. Earlier this month, she tried to get two amendments attached to the NDAA: one to study the effects of Tuberville’s promotion logjam, and another to codify the Defense Department policy Tuberville is protesting. Both amendments were rejected.

And as a former helicopter pilot in the Navy and one of the few female military veterans in Congress, the fight may soon get more personal for Sherrill. Last week, President Joe Biden nominated Admiral Lisa Franchetti to be the Navy’s first-ever female leader – but her nomination is likely to get stuck in the Senate just like hundreds of others before hers.

Vacationing on the beaches of Mayorkas

Like many of his fellow Republicans, Rep. Jeff Van Drew (R-Dennis) has repeatedly expressed his disapproval of Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas, whom Republicans accuse of failing to address undocumented immigration at the southern border. At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Wednesday, Van Drew turned that disapproval into something more concrete.

“We arrive at an inevitable conclusion that I do not take lightly,” Van Drew declared after citing listing the Department of Homeland Security’s alleged failings. “Secretary Mayorkas, you must resign. Will you resign?”

Mayorkas declined to do so, prompting Van Drew to go further.

“Secretary Mayorkas, if you will not resign, that leaves us with no other option,” he said. “You should be impeached.”

Van Drew’s stance is not exactly a surprise, given that he was already a co-sponsor of a bill introduced at the beginning of this year initiating impeachment proceedings against Mayorkas. But if nothing else, his speech – and his high-profile perch on the Judiciary Committee – cements Van Drew, once a mild-mannered Democrat, as New Jersey’s most loudly conservative member of Congress.

More Garden State plots

A bill authored by Rep. Donald Payne Jr. (D-Newark) that directs the Federal Emergency Management Agency to create a consistent application process for anti-terrorism grants passed the House yesterday on a voice vote.

Also moving forward in committee was Senator Menendez’s “Patients Before Middlemen” bill, which aims to limit the impact that pharmacy benefit managers – essentially health care middlemen – can have on driving up prescription drug prices.

A number of New Jersey representatives also introduced new pieces of legislation this week, some with better chances of passage than others.

• Alongside several parents of the victims of the 2018 Parkland shooting, Gottheimer and a bipartisan cohort of his colleagues introduced a pair of bills focused on school safety yesterday: one to require silent panic alarms in all schools, and another to increase funding for school resource officers.

• Rep. Donald Norcross (D-Camden) also helped introduce two significant bills this week, with his focus being on workers’ rights. One of the bills would increase the federal minimum wage all the way to $17 an hour from its current rate of $7.25, while the other would allow workers to deduct union dues from their taxes – echoing similar legislation introduced in the New Jersey Legislature last month.

• Two New Jersey representatives, Kim and Sherrill, teamed up to reintroduce the “Solutions Not Stigmas Act,” which would create a new grant program for substance abuse treatment training.

• And two other New Jersey members of Congress, Booker and Watson Coleman, reintroduced their “Federal Jobs Guarantee Development Act,” establishing a pilot jobs guarantee program in up to 15 high-unemployment cities and communities.

Finally, yesterday was National New Jersey Day. The New Jersey Globe can unfortunately confirm that Congress passed no legislation to mark the historic occasion.

This story was updated at 5:00 p.m. with comment from Senator Booker on his NDAA vote.