THE BURNED OVER DISTRICT

In the same week that the Republican members of the House gleefully slashed the Amtrak budget immediately after a fatal demonstration of what happens when Congress does not fund the mandates it self-righteously imposes, the self same Republicans passed a military budget after jumping through hoops to cram $Billions in excess funding that was not requested by the Pentagon.

The National Defense Authorization Act passed 269 to 151 in a largely party line vote.

“Whatever our troops need to get the job done, they should get it, and the House has acted to provide just that,” said the House speaker, John A. Boehner of Ohio. “With all the threats our troops face and the sacrifices they make, Democrats’ opposition to this defense bill is in fact indefensible.”

Democrats were particularly upset over Republican attempts to circumvent the across-the-board spending cuts known as sequestration that began in 2013, saying they could not accept any increases in military spending without equivalent increases for other programs.

But in a maneuver intended to skirt the military spending caps, the legislation includes roughly $39 billion in an Overseas Contingency Operations fund, which is reserved for emergency military operations and exempt from sequestration.

Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland, said that he did not mind the increases in military spending, but that Congress needs “to be taking care of domestic things, too.”

“There’s too many things we need to deal with — the things that help people who aspire to get into the middle class and stay in the middle class,” Mr. Cummings said. “My concerns are more those kinds of issues, you know, some kind of balance here. I believe in a strong military, but I also believe that we need to have a strong country.”

In a letter to her colleagues Thursday evening, Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the Democratic leader, urged her party’s lawmakers to vote against the military spending bill.

“The Republican defense authorization bill before the House is both bad budgeting and harmful to military planning — perpetuating uncertainty and instability in the defense budget, and damaging the military’s ability to plan and prepare for the future,” Ms. Pelosi wrote. “Republicans should come together with Democrats in a fiscally responsible way to protect our national security and grow our economy.”

President Obama has threatened to veto the legislation, which Defense Secretary Ashton B. Carter last week described as “clearly a road to nowhere.”

While Mr Boehner was piously talking about the troops,very little of the funding was targeted for their needs, the bulk going to useless "weapons systems" like the F-35 and other M-I-C feasts upon the Treasury. And just because that is the way they are, the Republicans also took a swipe at the Hispanic community by removing an amendment that would have assisted Hispanic enlistment. But they are all for National Security.