Obama Repeats Threat to Veto Bill Over F-22 Jet
By CHRISTOPHER DREW
nytimes.com
President Obama placed his political capital on the line Monday and reiterated his threat to veto a military spending bill unless the Senate removed $1.75 billion set aside to buy seven additional F-22 fighter jets.
Mr. Obama stepped up his campaign after liberal Democrats like Senators Edward M. Kennedy and John Kerry of Massachusetts said they supported the purchases, arguing that the program would retain high-paying jobs in many districts nationwide.
The F-22, the world’s costliest fighter jet, is the most prominent weapons system that Mr. Obama wants to cancel or cut in his plan to rein in military spending. A vote by the Senate to keep producing the plane would be an embarrassing setback for him.
Military analysts say it has always been hard to persuade Congress to halt big weapons programs like the F-22, made by Lockheed Martin, which has suppliers in 44 states and provides 25,000 jobs.
Congress has agreed with Mr. Obama’s plans to cut more experimental programs like missile defense. But support for the F-22 has strengthened recently. As the Senate took up debate on the bill on Monday, Senate leaders said it was hard to predict how the vote would go.
Senator Carl Levin, Democrat of Michigan and chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Senator John McCain of Arizona, the panel’s top Republican, are leading the fight to cap F-22 production at 187 planes.
Their committee voted 13-11 in late June to add the money for the seven additional planes. But Mr. Levin and Mr. McCain, who was Mr. Obama’s opponent in the 2008 election, voted against that measure, and they filed an amendment on Monday to remove the money from the bill.
In a letter to Mr. McCain on Monday, Mr. Obama wrote that Pentagon leaders “do not need these planes.”
The Pentagon would rather buy unmanned aircraft to gather intelligence in Afghanistan and accelerate the testing for the F-35, a new plane designed to attack ground targets. Pentagon officials say the F-22 is hard to maintain and costs $44,000 to operate for an hour, compared with $30,000 for older planes.
But many Republicans in Congress say more F-22s, which were designed for aerial combat, are needed as a hedge against countries like China.
And a growing number of Democrats are questioning why the administration would let such high-paying union jobs go when it is spending billions to save or create other jobs.
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