US Speaker Mike Johnson has suffered another humiliating political defeat at the hands of his own party on Thursday as he was forced to abandon plans to pass a veterans benefits bill designed to be one of the GOP’s big legislative wins before the November midterms.
Just minutes before the bill was slated to come to the floor, Johnson and his team pulled it from the schedule as holdouts within his own conference refused to back the measure, two people in the room familiar with the development briefed the US broadcasters.
The setback came despite a last-minute, closed-door effort by the speaker to salvage the vote and marked the second time in a month that House leadership has been forced to shelve the legislation.
A Tug-of-War Over Who Pays For Veterans’ Benefits
The legislation at the centre of the collapse, the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act, bundles together more than 60 individual veterans bills. This includes widely popular measures such as the Major Richard Star Act, which would let medically retired, combat-injured veterans draw both military retirement pay and full VA disability compensation, and the Love Lives On Act, which would preserve survivor benefits for military widows and widowers who remarry before age 55.
But the package has been engulfed for weeks in controversy over how it is funded.
To help pay for the new benefits, the bill would change the VA’s rating schedule for tinnitus and obstructive sleep apnea, two of the most common service-connected disabilities, and a provision the Veterans of Foreign Wars estimates could reduce future disability compensation by roughly 57 billion dollars over a decade. This would affect as many as 1.5 million veterans.
The bill’s funding mechanism has split the US veterans’ advocacy community down the middle.
The VFW and Disabled American Veterans have led the opposition, with VFW National Commander Carol Whitmore saying the organisation “strongly opposes the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act as currently drafted because it asks future disabled veterans to bear the cost of expanding benefits” through the ratings changes.
Disabled American Veterans was blunter still in a social media post, writing that “the good simply does not outweigh the bad” and arguing the bill “would cut up to 57 billion dollars in future disability compensation for 1.5 million veterans but provides only 7.9 billion dollars in new VA benefits, just 14 percent.”
The American Legion, Wounded Warrior Project, the Elizabeth Dole Foundation and more than 20 other groups, by contrast, have backed the package, arguing it represents the best chance in years to move a large number of veterans’ priorities at once.
Cole Lyle, the American Legion’s national director of legislative affairs, reportedly warned that failing to act would leave the disability rating changes to take effect on their own anyway, without any of the offsetting benefits.
“The worst-case scenario is we do not get any action,” Lyle said. “The changes to sleep apnea and tinnitus will go into effect regardless, and we will have lost the opportunity to find under the congressional budget rules a ‘pay for’ that is palatable and feasible.”
Inside The Collapse
The bill’s Thursday unravelling followed more than an hour of heated debate on the floor.
US Representative Chris Deluzio, an Iraq War veteran and Pennsylvania Democrat, offered a motion to send the measure back to the House Veterans’ Affairs Committee. The move turned out to be the procedural gambit that failed by a single vote, 211 to 210, after Representative Victoria Spartz of Indiana switched her vote at the last minute.
Despite turning back that challenge, US House leadership still could not muster the votes for final passage and pulled the bill rather than risk an outright defeat on the floor.
At least three Republicans, Representatives Max Miller of Ohio, Anna Paulina Luna of Florida and Jeff Van Drew of New Jersey, had already broken with leadership to side with Democrats on the procedural motion.
Tensions boiled over away from the cameras as well.
In a closed-door meeting Johnson convened with a group of GOP moderates to try to salvage the vote, the conversation grew so tense that Representative Zach Nunn told his colleague, Representative Anna Paulina Luna, to stop talking mid-conversation, according to two sources in the room.
Luna, who has drawn the ire of party leaders in recent weeks over an unrelated dispute involving an election bill, had been explaining why she would not back down from her push to send the legislation back to committee. She ultimately left the meeting, the sources told the broadcasters.
US Speaker Johnson framed the retreat differently in public, telling reporters in DC that the delay was necessary to correct “a lot of misinformation out there” rather than a reflection of insufficient support within his own conference.
“Our Veterans Affairs Committee has done a great job engaging with veterans,” Johnson said.
“There still remains, though, a lot of misinformation out there, so instead of putting the bill on the floor this afternoon, we’re going to delay it just a bit. We’re going to have several more weeks ahead of us before we get back here in September, would be my guess when we process all this again.”
Democrats Seize On The Turmoil
US House Veterans’ Affairs Committee ranking member Mark Takano, a California Democrat, rejected Johnson’s characterisation outright, saying Republican leaders simply lacked the votes.
“They knew they didn’t want the embarrassment of actually going through the vote because they would lose the vote,” Takano said, adding that “they want to live for another day, but the problem is that there’s a limited number of days to do anything.”
Takano also said watching veterans’ organisations split into opposing camps over the bill had been one of the more disheartening aspects of the debate.
US Representative Jeff Van Drew, one of the three Republicans who broke ranks, said afterwards that the underlying goals of the bill were sound but that the financing mechanism was not.
“It has good provisions, but paying for them by reducing disability compensation for veterans with service-related health issues is the wrong approach,” Van Drew wrote on social media.
“We can, and must, do better. Start by passing the Major Richard Star Act.”
US House Veterans’ Affairs Committee Chairman Mike Bost, an Illinois Republican and the bill’s chief sponsor, defended the package as a matter of legislative control rather than benefit cuts, arguing the disability ratings changes were already headed for implementation regardless of what Congress does.
“This is moving forward regardless,” Bost said on the floor. “The question is whether the savings associated with the changes by the VA should remain in their control and the bureaucrats’ control, or do we use our Article I power to reinvest it into veterans and their families.”
Bost’s office said passage of the Take Care of America’s Veterans Act remains “a top priority for Chairman Bost, Speaker Johnson and House Republicans.”
A Broader Pattern Of Leadership Strain?
The defeat is the latest in a string of complications for Johnson’s leadership. Only days earlier, the speaker had struck a truce with hardline conservatives to reopen the House floor after they had effectively seized control and blocked him from advancing key legislation for two weeks.
US lawmakers left Washington on Thursday for a break without a clear path forward on the veterans package, which Johnson now says will likely not return to the floor until September.
With a razor-thin majority, the US speaker can afford only a handful of Republican defections on any given vote, a math problem that has repeatedly complicated his ability to deliver on the party’s stated priorities ahead of the November midterms.
