Congress "rebuked" Biden on military budget.

Even Dems found his proposal inadequate.

Joe Biden ran for president as a man of the center-right. Democrats nominated him because, as such, he was less threatening to voters than Bernie Sanders. Biden’s nomination gave needed reassurance to the electorate that the Democrats would not drive the country hard left. It even caused some to believe he would seek to govern in a bipartisan manner.

But Biden is not a man of the center right and as president he’s displayed no genuine interest in bipartisanship. It’s hard to think of any issue on which Biden has governed as other than a standard-issue left-wing Democrat.

He certainly hasn’t done so when it comes to defending America. Indeed, this Politico article finds that Biden is to the left of congressional Democrats on the defense budget. It supports this view by identifying ways in which “a Democratic-led Congress. . .rebuked Biden’s military budget and a raft of other plans” in the National Defense Authorization Act it just passed.

First, the Act allocates $45 billion more for national defense spending than the Biden administration proposed. Second, the Act reverses efforts to kill a new nuclear missile and scrambles Pentagon efforts to retire a number of ships and aircraft.

Specifically, it:

(a) keeps alive a sea-launched cruise missile first proposed by the Trump administration that Biden wants to eliminate,

(b) requires the Pentagon to keep most of its inventory of B83 nuclear gravity bombs that Biden proposed retiring,

c) authorizes $32.6 billion to buy new ships, boosting the budget by $4.7 billion and ordering three new hulls the Navy didn’t ask for,

d) bars the Navy from retiring a dozen warships it had planned to decommission,

(e) thwarts the administration’s plans to retire Navy EA-18G Growler electronic warfare jets and similarly blocks efforts by the Air Force to retire some F-22 fighters through fiscal 2027, and

(f) boosts procurement for a range of aircraft across the military services, most notably eight Boeing F/A-18 Super Hornets the Navy didn’t seek in its budget.

Third, under the Act Biden will be forced to agree to repeal the Pentagon’s policy requiring troops to receive the Covid vaccine or face expulsion from the military. As Politico says, rescinding this mandate “is a black eye for Biden and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, who still back the policy. . .”

Fourth, although the final bill largely avoids issues related to the Pentagon’s efforts to root out “extremism” in the military, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s report accompanying its version of the bill calls for those plans to be curtailed. The report argues that the Pentagon anti-extremism effort “is an inappropriate use of taxpayer funds, and should be discontinued by the Department of Defense immediately.”

Politico characterizes Biden’s setbacks in this legislative round as a “bipartisan rebuke.” This may overstate things.

The Act represents a compromise. Left to their own devices, Democrats would have given Biden more of what he wants.

Put differently, it would have given America less defense and more wokeness. Indeed, the Senate Armed Services Committee’s rejection of the Pentagons’ “anti-extremism effort” was the result of Angus King, nominally an Independent, joining with Committee Republicans. The Democrats were fine with wasting taxpayer money to address a non-problem.

Nonetheless, according to Politico, some Democrats thought it was “appropriate” to revisit the vaccine mandate for members of the military. And, again according to Politico, “both parties roundly rejected Biden’s $813 billion military spending plan as too low to meet worldwide threats and counter the impacts of inflation on the Pentagon.”

Thus, there is some distance between Team Biden and congressional Democrats when it comes to military preparedness. That distance represents the degree to which Biden resides to the left of his party’s congressional delegation.

Perhaps the distance is the product of Biden’s deep distrust and seeming dislike of military leaders. This prejudice — one of the few things Biden has been consistent about through the years — caused him to dismiss warnings about the Taliban’s rapid ascendency, with catastrophic consequences.

The consequences of Biden’s plans for the military might also be catastrophic, given the threat China poses to Taiwan, among other potential flashpoints. Even congressional Democrats understand this. But not faux center-leftist Joe Biden.