House Passes $633 Billion Defense Spending Bill
Massive Consensus Bill Scraps Even Feigned Efforts to Stop Detention of US Citizens
In a 315-107 vote this evening, the House of Representatives has approved a massive $633 billion National Defense Authorization Act for 2013, a consensus version which will now move on to the Senate for rubber stamping.
The bill is something of an increase over the initial House version, which was $606 billion and was approved in July, and a slight increase over the Senate version, which was $631 billion.
One key difference from the Senate version is the removal of the Feinstein Amendment, which was aimed at banning the military from detaining US citizens on American soil and holding them without charges.
The Feinstein Amendment was itself controversial, because while many Senators voted for it, many believed it was actual aimed at making it easier to detain civilians. With the removal, the NDAA of 2013 doesn’t even attempt to rectify the 2012 version’s granting of broad powers to detain citizens on suspicion.
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Rich
December 21st, 2012 at 7:15 am
What about the "fiscal cliff"?
James Cole
December 21st, 2012 at 9:58 am
This is nonsense. The real cost of the USA military is well over 1 trillion dollars a year.
Left out of this budget are. All the off budget black operations spending. Maybe 100 billion dollars
Direct payments to US allies like Israel to fund their armed forced. The US department of Energy which pays for the US nuclear weapons programs, the Veterans Affairs Dept. which pays for all the costs of military veterans needs. etc. etc.
USA taxpayers must pay over a trillion dollars a year to fund the US military. Now A Days, mush of this trillion is simply borrowed money, as USA taxes are not anywhere near high enough to fund this vast military complex.