Partisan gridlock over federal judges and intragovernmental strife over trade tariffs threaten to bog down Senate debate on a 2019 National Defense Authorization Act that would be key for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) work on a new low-yield nuclear-warhead.
In a Tuesday email, an aide to Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said floor debate on the defense policy bill could begin as soon as this week, but only after the Senate confirms three people President Donald Trump has nominated for lifetime appointments as federal judges.
That email arrived after McConnell himself told reporters on Capitol Hill that Senate Democrats have obstructed Trump’s judicial picks by demanding time-consuming procedural votes on their nominations. McConnell has also said, in this election year, the Senate has confirmed a record number of federal judges.
Even after the matter of the three judges is settled and the NDAA reaches the floor, the bill could be caught up in the acrimonious debate over aluminum and steel tariffs Trump has levied in the name of national security. The tarrifs have riled Republicans and Democrats alike, as well as Canada and other U.S. allies abroad that abruptly found themselves facing trade penalties.
In response, retiring Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), a sometimes-critic of Trump, drafted legislation that would require Congress to approve those tariffs. McConnell said Tuesday he did not want that “contentious” bill on the floor as stand-alone legislation, but that Corker could offer it as an amendment to the 2019 NDAA.
The Senate has yet to publish the text of its NDAA, but the bill authorizes just about everything the National Nuclear Security Administration requested in 2019 for its portfolio of nuclear weapons programs.
That includes roughly $2 billion for the NNSA’s four big-ticket, nuclear-weapon life-extension programs, plus clearing the semiautonomous Department of Energy agency to start $65 million worth of work on the new low-yield, submarine-launched ballistic-missile warhead the Trump administration called for in February in its Nuclear Posture Review.
The low-yield weapon would be a dialed-down version of the W76 warhead on Trident II D5 missiles now carried aboard Ohio-class submarines. The NNSA wants to modify an unspecified number of these warheads sometime in the fiscal year that starts Oct. 1, but the agency needs congressional approval first.
“We’ll see what happens,” McConnell said Tuesday.
