SE Connecticut News

WASHINGTON, D.C. – On July 14, Rep. Joe Courtney (CT-02), Ranking Member of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, issued the following statement after voting ‘no’ on House passage of the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act. Read a joint statement from House Armed Services Committee leadership here.

“Every year since I came to Congress, I’ve worked across the aisle with my Republican colleagues to craft a National Defense Authorization Act that meets our national security needs and supports our servicemembers. That’s exactly what the House Armed Services Committee did for seven months and made tremendous bipartisan progress, crafting a measure that passed 58-1. As the Ranking Member of the Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, we successfully advanced top priorities for U.S. Navy shipbuilding, eastern Connecticut’s defense industrial base, and our domestic sealift capabilities,” said Ranking Member Joe Courtney (CT-02).

“Unfortunately, over the course of this week’s deliberations on the House floor, a handful of extreme Freedom Caucus Members hijacked our bipartisan bill with poison pill amendments, despite Members like myself urging the Chamber to uphold the bill’s bipartisan spirit. Rather than heeding these good-faith warnings, the Republican Majority shoved provisions into the bill to drastically limit access to reproductive health care for over 400,000 female servicemembers and reduced the scope of TRICARE health care coverage for servicemembers to a lower level than the coverage available to civilians in the private commercial health care market. Taken together, the partisan amendments added to the bill this week undermine our ability to recruit, maintain, and support our military forces.

“The bill I helped pass out of committee is not the bill before us today. I cannot justify supporting a distorted version of the bipartisan work we did in Committee that sacrifices the freedom of those who defend our nation under the guise of national defense. Thankfully, this vote today is just one step in a larger, longer process that will play out through the rest of the year. As a senior member of the Committee who has been a conferee in House-Senate negotiations for the last several years, I remain committed to doing all I can to get to a conference with the Senate to restore a bill that reflects the bipartisan model demonstrated by the House Armed Services Committee.”

Original source can be found here.