Senate Passes Revised Military Spending Bill, Obama Will Sign

In a 91-3 vote, the Senate has approved the revised military spending bill for 2016 that was also passed by the House last week. The bill offered less than 1% cuts from the previous bill and retained restrictions on releasing Guantanamo Bay detainees.

Though it had previously threatened a veto of the bill, the White House today affirmed that President Obama will sign the bill as currently presented, suggesting the trivial cuts were sufficient. Likely, however, the shift is a function of both houses having a veto-proof majority on the bill.

Previous suggestions were that some in the Senate wanted to revise the bill to open up more avenues for releasing Gitmo detainees, though this ultimately did not happen, and the White House seems to be totally fine with it, despite complaining for months about those restrictions.

Instead, the White House now says they want “cooperation” on Congress on closing Guantanamo Bay, but that they intend to keep this totally separate from the military spending bill, which itself has for years been chock full of restrictions on the promised closure.