Turner takes flight with hawks

In a House budget process that was messier than expected, Rep. Michael Turner (R-Ohio) came out a winner.

Turner, a senior member of the House Armed Services Committee, was a leading voice in the duel between fiscal conservatives and defense hawks over the amount of military spending in the chamber’s $3.8 trillion budget roadmap.

{mosads}When the smoke cleared, it was Turner and his band of pro-defense Republicans who came out on top, securing an additional $20 billion in war funding that fiscal conservatives had tried to block.

“He’s been extremely important in the whole debate,” said Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-Calif.). “Mike’s great. He’s a great leader, and he actually did pull us together here. He’s rocking and rolling.”

Turner’s ascent began on Feb. 27, when he spearheaded a letter demanding that the House budget boost defense spending over the budget caps under sequestration.

Seventy Republicans signed the letter, making Turner the de facto leader of a sizable voting bloc that could have prevented a budget from passing.

Republican leaders assured them approval of an amendment to the budget that would boost the Pentagon’s Overseas Contingency Operations (OCO) fund to $96 billion with no offsets. The change would be put into place when the Budget Committee marked up Chairman Tom Price’s (R-Ga.) blueprint.

But some conservatives on the committee balked at the plan, and the budget passed out of the panel without the change.

That forced the House Rules Committee into the risky strategy of holding floor votes on two budgets: Price-1, where the $20 billion in defense funding was offset, and Price-2, where it wasn’t. 

Turner and Armed Services Chairman Mac Thornberry (R-Texas) convinced members to vote for the second budget, and it was approved 219-208, while the first plan received only 105 votes.

“We’re to the breaking point. This budget was absolutely critical,” Turner told The Hill after the final vote to adopt the budget resolution.

The vote was a heady moment for Turner, who was first elected to the House in 2002 after serving two terms as the mayor of Dayton, Ohio. While his district has been one of the most competitive in the country in the last two presidential elections, Turner has won more than 55 percent of the vote each time his name has appeared on the ballot.

His western Ohio district also neighbors Speaker John Boehner’s (R-Ohio) and is home to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, a service research and support hub that is Ohio’s largest single employer, with around 27,000 people working or stationed there. 

Turner, 55, surprised many when he declined to seek the Armed Services gavel last year, instead opting to run for chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee — a bid he lost.

The seven-term lawmaker’s recent moves suggest he might be playing a long game, potentially with the end-goal of leading the Armed Services panel — Congress’s largest  — when Thornberry’s term as chairman expires in six years.

Turner, who helms the Armed Services Tactical Air and Land Forces Subcomittee, brushed off the suggestion that he is angling for the committee’s top spot.

“This is about getting the job done for 2016,” he said. “We’ve got a long way to go before anybody really has to consider any of the other issues. I think it’s just do the job, and let’s get it done.”

Turner stressed that he kept Thornberry in the loop before passing around the letter and kept him up to date on his efforts “because this was a very precariously balanced process.”

Thornberry, who himself lost a bid to run the Armed Services Committee, after the GOP regained control of the House in 2010, said he didn’t feel undercut by Turner’s efforts.

“I appreciate help from anybody who’s concerned about defense,” said Thornberry, who sent a “Dear Colleague” to all GOP members the night before the budget votes.

Turner’s colleagues on the committee welcomed his assertive approach.

“I don’t think we would have gotten to Price-2 without those 70 members,” said Rep. Rob Wittman (R-Va.), who helped circulate Turner’s original letter.

Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) said the group Turner organized “was pivotal.”

“It was a tough letter for him to develop and then for those of us who signed on, because we certainly were keenly interested in having a budget, but we wanted the budget to reflect the challenges to our country,” he said.

Turner said he was motivated to take on a larger role starting with the Republican retreat in January, where it “became clear that the Republican Conference did not have the same priorities that [Armed Services panel members] believed needed to be addressed with sequestration.”

His concerns were stoked further in February during a panel retreat to the Naval Academy in Annapolis, where Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Martin Dempsey laid out the “devastating” impact sequestration was having on the military. 

But the real impetus came soon after the retreat, when “we started hearing from the Budget Committee that they were not taking our concerns into the formulation of their budget,” Turner said. “So we had to act.”

Turner said the vote totals on the budget show that national security is “incredibly important, and the wave is behind supporting it.”

“Now we have to turn to a legislative fix for sequestration,” Turner said. “We’ve got to keep this going.”