Passing 2025 defense spending bill will be ‘particularly difficult’

While passing the 2024 defense budget was arduous as lawmakers struggled to agree on government funding plans for nearly six months into the fiscal year, negotiating the 2025 defense spending is shaping up to be “particularly difficult.” The Pentagon proposed a fiscal 2025 budget of $ 849.8 billion, about 1% higher than this year’s budget request. The top line figure aligns with the Fiscal Responsibility Act passed last year, which sets limits on defense and non-defense discretionary spending. Defense officials said the 1% increase would not be enough to cover…

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USPS unions, top House Democrat back bill setting harsher sentences for robbing letter carriers

Ryan Pierani remembers getting robbed when he used to deliver pizzas. But he never expected to be robbed on the job while delivering mail and packages, as a letter carrier for the Postal Service. “When you carry cash on you, you always expect to be robbed,” Pierani, now a letter carrier in Cincinnati, Ohio, said in an interview Wednesday. “You have to be on high alert, and it happens here and there.” But Pierani wasn’t on guard, when a young man approached his USPS-marked delivery van in January 2022. He…

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150 Democrats Vote Against Bill to Deport Illegal Immigrants Convicted of DUIs

Some 150 House Democrats voted Thursday against a bill to allow the deportation of illegal immigrants who have been convicted of driving while under the influence of alcohol and other drugs. “In the United States, someone dies in a crash with an impaired driver every 45 minutes,” the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Barry Moore, R-Ala., told The Daily Signal in a statement Thursday. “I lost two of my young newlywed constituents to an illegal immigrant driving under the influence of alcohol.” “I’m proud to join with my House Republican colleagues to…

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A Real Woman Explains Why Ohio’s Governor Was Wrong to Veto Bill to Curb Transgenderism

Ohio Gov. Mike DeWine, a Republican, on Friday issued an executive order prohibiting gender-transition surgeries on minors in his state and issued draft administrative rules on so-called gender-affirming care for minors and adults. DeWine’s directives came a week after his Dec. 29 veto of House Bill 68, the Saving Adolescents from Experimentation (SAFE) Act, which would restrict any gender-affirming care for minors in Ohio and bar biological males who “identify” as females from participating in girls’ and women’s interscholastic athletics. Heritage Foundation legal scholar Sarah Parshall Perry herewith takes issue with…

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Big pay raise for troops in defense bill sent to Biden. Conservatives stymied on cultural issues

WASHINGTON (AP) — The House passed a defense policy bill Thursday that authorizes the biggest pay raise for troops in more than two decades, overcoming objections from some conservatives concerned the measure did not do enough to restrict the Pentagon’s diversity initiatives, abortion travel policy and gender-affirming health care for transgender service members. The $ 886 billion bill was approved by a vote of 310-118 and now goes to President Joe Biden after the Senate had overwhelmingly passed it Wednesday. It is likely the last piece of major legislation Congress…

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