Building an amendment to defund the Pentagon
Speaking Security Newsletter | Advisory Note for Organizers and Candidates, n°68 | 15 February 2021
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Summary
Defunding the Pentagon requires a mass movement to deter Congress from siding with the profit-driven war industry. But we will not recruit enough people strictly through espousing the pragmatic or virtuous cases for shrinking the military budget.
To attract a mass of workers, this initiative must appeal to widely-popular, material interests. Given the failure of the current administration to deliver $2,000 survival checks despite how much they are needed, below is a pathway to send out 171 million of them by partially defunding the Pentagon.
We know the money for this project will be available based on Congress’ selective deficit dogmatism — unlike social spending, the Pentagon is perversely exempt from the How do you pay for it question.
Situation
Reps. Barbara Lee and Mark Pocan (two of the very best we have in Congress, just FYI) will reportedly introduce an amendment to (partially) defund the Pentagon this year, as they did back in July. Had that one passed, $74 billion from this year’s military budget would have gone to social programs in green energy, education, infrastructure, and health. Bernie Sanders introduced virtually the same amendment in the Senate.
Both failed. In total, zero Republicans supported these amendments. Only 92 Democrats supported it in the House (139 opposed), and just 23 including Sanders in the Senate (23 opposed).
The vote count may improve this year: Additions like Reps. Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush will certainly help, as will some subtractions, like the incumbents Bowman and Bush took down in the primaries (Eliot Engel and William Clay, respectively).
But without being able to count on (m)any Republican votes again this year, there’s a ton of pressure to get Democrats on board. Politico asked Sanders in an interview last month on how he’ll go about doing that:
It’s not dad’s fault that he didn’t have an answer — nobody’s quite sure of this one. What we do know is that we will not convince enough members to willingly support an amendment that defunds the Pentagon. But we can exert political pressure so as to make them feel like they don’t have a choice.
Why we need a mass movement
Last year’s amendments would have passed had congressional votes reflected public opinion. Here’s a public poll conducted prior to those votes that described the amendment and then asked respondents how they felt about it. Congressional Democrats ended up voting more conservatively than Republican voters would have.
Part of this disconnect between the public and Congress is because Congress enjoys financial privileges the rest of don’t. For example, the more money House Democrats take from military contractors (in the form of campaign or PAC contributions) the more likely they are to vote how the war industry wants them to vote. Conversely, the less a member takes, the more likely it is they’ll vote like a reasonable human being.
To show this in a way that’s relevant to this specific context, I lined up House Democrats by war industry cash received, split the list into thirds, then calculated what percentage of each group supported Pocan’s amendment last year. If industry cash didn’t matter, each group would have had roughly the same vote count.
^Data via Open Secrets, refers to 2019-20 data, retrieved in January.
Building a coercive amendment
That we’re trying to align congressional votes with public opinion when the former is effectively being paid to ignore the latter makes our task pretty clear. We’ve got to figure out how to get members of Congress to vote for an amendment they wouldn’t otherwise vote for. This involves condensing the whole idea of opportunity cost or trade-offs into a single vote.
Specifically, it’s about moving defunding the Pentagon from the political outcome to the process by which some other broadly-desirable political outcome is given life. One way would be to organize around jobs. Framing last year’s amendment as a jobs program might have coerced some recalcitrant members to support it out of fear that they’d be seen as voting against creating an additional half million jobs, which is what they effectively did by opposing it.
But public trust in the government is at a historic low, so the promise of jobs sometime in the future doesn’t guarantee that a mass of workers will suddenly make time to pressure their representative and senators, especially as many of us are preoccupied battling the shittiness of everyday life. We’re also up against the war industry’s campaign contributions, funding of think tanks, and the 600-700 industry lobbyists these corporations will deploy this year. We truly need a mass movement.
With that in mind, $2,000 survival checks might spark a sufficient amount of public interest in defunding the Pentagon, given their popularity. Overall public support for $2,000 checks is high (65 percent), even among Republicans (54). Among Democrats, it’s 78 percent (data via a 30 Dec 2020 Data for Progress poll).
This case is made stronger, unfortunately, by the way in which this administration has approached economic impact payments so far. It doesn’t look like we’ll get the $2,000 checks Biden promised unless we take it from his military budget.
The Resistance
Party leadership would deride this plan as unconscionable. Which is a pity, because they were my inspiration: On average, 82 percent of House Democrats took more war industry cash last year than the average American received in economic relief.
Worse yet: From 2019-20, over a fifth of House Democrats received the equivalent (at least) of recurring $2,000 monthly checks in the form of PAC and campaign contributions from military contractors. Almost one-third received at least the equivalent of recurring $1,400 checks over these two years.
A rough sketch of an amendment
The beauty in framing defunding the Pentagon as the process instead of the outcome is that it encourages an aggressive posture (the more you reduce, the more you can offer people). So if next year’s NDAA (defense bill) is $760 billion (my estimate, based on DOD comptroller projections for FY2022), a 10 percent conversion would get you 38 million $2,000 checks, while a 20 percent-er would obviously get you 76 million of them.
In the very lo-fi amendment below (I’m not a lawyer) I wrote it as ~45 percent because that produces 171 million $2,000 checks, which I think is close to how many people should have received those initial $1,200 checks (we’re at 160 million recipients for that round, last I heard). To be sure, this is just a guess on what this thing would actually look like:
Sec.____. REDUCTION IN AMOUNT AUTHORIZED TO BE APPROPRIATED FOR FISCAL YEAR 2022 BY THIS ACT; ESTABLISHMENT OF ECONOMIC IMPACT PAYMENT PROGRAM TO PROVIDE ECONOMIC RELIEF TO HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS OF AMERICANS.
(a) IN GENERAL.—The amount authorized to be appropriated for fiscal year 2022 by this Act is—
The aggregate amount authorized to be appropriated for fiscal year 2022 by this Act (other than for military personnel and the Defense Health Program); minus
The amount equal to 45 percent of the aggregate amount described in paragraph (1).
(b) ALLOCATION.—The reduction made by subsection (a) shall—
apply on a pro rata basis among the accounts and funds for which amounts are authorized to be appropriated by this Act (other than military personnel and the Defense Health Program);
be applied on a pro rata basis across each program, project, and activity funded by the account or fund concerned; and
be used by the Secretary of the Treasury to carry out the Economic Impact Relief (EIP) program described in subsection (c).
Thanks for your time,
Stephen (@stephensemler; stephen@securityreform.org)
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