When a Defense Spending Bill Hit the Sausage Grinder, It Wasn’t Pretty
THE FXBG ADVANCE FRIDAY 6/10/26 AFTERNOON READ
By Hugh Lessig, ADVANCE MILITARY WRITER
Last month, we wrote about federal legislation that created blueprint for U.S. defense spending. It would help thousands of military families, service members and defense contractors in the Fredericksburg area. The bill had cleared committee and was set to wind its way through Congress.
Until it wasn’t.
The defense bill became intertwined with the SAVE America Act. That’s the voter reform bill – or voter suppression bill, depending on your view—which is very big deal for President Trump. House Republicans twisted themselves into legislative knots trying to pass both the voter bill and the defense bill at the same time.
Ultimately, they failed and took an extended July 4 vacation.
The military community shouldn’t panic. The defense bill, known as the National Defense Authorization Act, is considered must-pass legislation. Congress has until the fall to approve it. Both Republicans and Democrats support the bill, so they should find a way.
But what happened last month represents how legislative sausage-making can sometimes gum up the works in Congress, even for bills that have a lot of support.
The trouble began when House Speaker Mike Johnson tried to merge the controversial SAVE Act with the more popular defense bill. His explanation to The Hill newspaper is a mouthful.
“We’re going to pass a MIRV, or what’s better known as a ‘merge onto the rule.’ So what that means is, when Republicans vote… they’ll be voting not just for the NDAA and everything else in there, but they’ll be voting to merge onto that the SAVE America Act we passed back in February,” Johnson said.
Combining these two disparate measures into one big glob didn’t work.
Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, R-Florida, favored another tactic. She wanted to do a cut-and-paste, taking key parts of the voter bill and sticking it into the defense bill text. You’d have legislation that authorizes money for aircraft carriers and military pay raises but somehow includes requirements for voter ID and proof of citizenship. That also ran into a roadblock.
You might wonder why Congress doesn’t require each bill to stand for one thing, full stop. It would prevent lawmakers from combining unrelated pieces of legislation and MIRVing themselves into a hole.
To see how that works, they could look to Richmond.
Lawmakers in the Virginia General Assembly are governed by the one-object rule. You’ll find it in Article 4, Section 12 of the Virginia State Constitution. It begins: “No law shall embrace more than one object, which shall be expressed in its title.”
Lawmakers can amend bills, but any amendment must relate to that single object. You can’t attach landfill regulations to mental health legislation for example.
In the frenzied General Assembly session, delegates and senators consider hundreds of bills in a few weeks. The one-object rule provides necessary guardrails, said Stephen Farnsworth, a longtime political analyst and professor emeritus of political science at the University of Mary Washington.
“There’s no doubt about it,” Farnsworth says. “The one-object rule in Virginia allows for less chaotic government in Virginia than in Washington. The process makes it easier for policymakers to compartmentalize, and that’s really important when you’re considering the number of bills that lawmakers in Richmond consider and the very limited time they have to consider them.”
However, Virgina’s rule probably isn’t the cure-all for legislative gridlock in D.C.
“The truth is, Congress would probably act a lot more rapidly if they had a one-object rule, but you might end up with a lot of stuff not passing as well,” Farnsworth says. “The wide-open lawmaking in Congress creates an environment for deal-making that’s more wide-ranging and can therefore be more successful.”
Congress has more time to consider bills than Virginia lawmakers. Senators and representatives are constantly in session through the year—holiday recesses aside—which gives them more time to cut deals.
“The one-object rule in Virginia makes a lot of sense for a legislature that, at most, is in session for 60 days,” Farnsworth says. “They have to move quickly. They have to keep it simple or nothing gets passed.”
So, we’ll probably never see Richmond’s simpler process making much headway in Congress.
“Whether Congress would be better off with such a rule is an interesting question,” Farnsworth says, “but it’s entirely hypothetical because lawmakers have zero interest in limiting their own range of operations.”
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We’ll keep you updated on defense bills in D.C. as they move through Congress. In the meantime, if you want to suggest a military, defense or veteran-related story idea, send it to hlessig@yahoo.com.
