Senate Rejects Effort To Curb Base Closings
By Helen Dewar
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, June 5, 2003; Page A06
This is very good news!
The Senate yesterday turned back an effort to scuttle a new round of military base closings scheduled for 2005, rejecting critics' arguments that economic and military climates are too uncertain to justify more closures.
Wrapping up leftover work on the $400.5 billion defense authorization bill for next year, the Senate also approved proposals to expedite citizenship for immigrants who serve in the U.S. military and to expand retirement benefits for disabled veterans. Both were approved by voice vote.
The House voted 414 to 5 yesterday to approve a separate bill to speed up naturalization for immigrants in the military, enhancing prospects for its enactment. The outlook for the retirement benefits proposal was more doubtful.
The defense bill will now go to a House-Senate conference, where another round of arguments over base closures appears likely. Closing bases is always controversial because military facilities generally play big roles in local economies and in local elected officials' political futures.
The House, normally more skittish than the Senate over base closures, voted earlier to limit the number of bases that could be considered for elimination.
The Senate's 53 to 42 vote to move ahead with the 2005 round of base closings represented a victory for the Pentagon and for a bipartisan group of senators who argued that savings from the closure of obsolete bases -- estimated at $6 billion a year -- could better be used in the war against terrorism.
Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had said he would recommend a veto of the defense bill if it included a repeal of the 2001 law authorizing the new round of closures.
In that law, Congress created a commission -- as it had done four times from 1988 to 1995 -- to recommend a list of bases to be closed or realigned. Under a procedure adopted after the Pentagon found it increasingly difficult to close bases one at a time, the president and Congress can accept or reject the whole list, but not alter it.
With uncertainty over troop deployments around the world, closing bases now "could be very counterproductive to our military preparedness," said Sen. Byron L. Dorgan (D-N.D.). "Before we start closing more bases in America, we need to get an assessment of our needs around the world," said Sen. Trent Lott (R-Miss.).
Sens. John W. Warner (R-Va.) and Carl M. Levin (D-Mich.), chairman and ranking minority member of the Armed Services Committee, said the Pentagon believes that as much as 25 percent of its current base capacity exceeds needs. "We are spending billions of dollars, year after year, maintaining infrastructure that we simply do not need," Levin said.
Virginia senators voted to push ahead with the base closings; Maryland senators voted to stop them.
Both House and Senate naturalization legislation would provide for more rapid procedures for military personnel to become citizens and establish protections for families if those soldiers are killed in battle. Immigrants may qualify immediately when serving in wartime, but must wait three years during peacetime. The House would change the waiting period to one year, while the Senate would make it two years. Both bills would expedite naturalization procedures for members of the National Guard and reserves, the Senate more so than the House.
The retirement proposal would allow disabled veterans to collect retirement benefits as well as disability benefits, rather than subtracting one from the other. Congress has allowed full benefits only in the case of those who were severely disabled or who suffered disabilities for which the Purple Heart was awarded.
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