WASHINGTON — The Senate on Tuesday voted overwhelmingly to pass a bipartisan $738 billion defense policy bill, sending President Trump one of the most expensive military measures in the nation’s history and one that he has championed as a critical priority.
The vote was 86-8 to clear the measure, which authorizes a 3 percent pay increase for the troops. It came as lawmakers sought to close out a burst of year-end bipartisan legislating even as the House is on the brink of impeaching Mr. Trump, and ended a monthslong period of disputes between Republicans and Democrats over how to steer military policy.
“Let the vote be so overwhelming there isn’t a military family in America who could doubt our commitment to them,” Senator Jim Inhofe of Oklahoma, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, said before lawmakers approved the bill. “Let’s use our vote to send a message to Russia and China that we’re revitalizing America’s power so we can win the competition for influence that will shape the kind of world our children and grandchildren are going to live in.”
The legislative package contains a pair of specific victories for Mr. Trump, who is expected to sign the bill later this week. It authorizes the Space Force, which he proposed last year — initially, in his own telling, as a joke — as the sixth branch of the American military. It would also provide 12 weeks of paid parental leave for civilian federal employees, a Democratic priority that was embraced by his son-in-law and senior adviser, Jared Kushner.
But it also contains a litany of rebukes to countries that have invoked bipartisan wrath on Capitol Hill, including Russia, China and Turkey.
The measure includes sanctions meant to block the construction of the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, a project spearheaded by a Russian energy company that would create an underwater pipeline under the Baltic Sea from Russia to Germany, essentially circumventing Ukraine in an attempt to reduce reliance on Ukraine’s pipelines to deliver gas to Europe.
Another provision would bar Turkey from acquiring American-made F-35 fighter jets, a rebuke of Ankara’s purchase of a Russian missile defense system, the S-400. Turkey’s foreign minister, Mevlut Cavusoglu, has made clear that Turkey intends to retaliate for the move with its own round of sanctions. It is the latest reprimand Congress has delivered to Turkey, coming just a week after the Senate unanimously voted to recognize the Armenian genocide as a matter of American foreign policy.
“As long as the S-400s are in Turkey under Turkish control, there will be no F-35s delivered to Turkey,” said Senator Jim Risch of Idaho, the chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee. “This is Erdogan’s choice, and he is well aware of the consequences.”
The bill also seeks to take a harder line against China. It would bar Wilbur Ross, the commerce secretary, from unilaterally removing the Chinese telecom giant Huawei from a so-called entity list, which bans American corporations from supplying foreign companies deemed potential security threats, until the Commerce Department certifies to Congress that the company is no longer considered a security threat. The administration has previously offered the Chinese company a reprieve.
But the legislation is also notable for what it does not include, after Democrats agreed to jettison a number of provisions handcuffing the president on military matters. The House in July passed its own version of the bill that would have put a liberal stamp on defense policy, passing amendment after amendment that sought to rein in the president’s powers, including on declaring war and diverting military construction funds to pay for his border wall.
Democratic lawmakers and aides from both the House and Senate, working to reconcile the House bill with the far less confrontational Senate measure, eventually agreed to drop those restrictions, in search of a deal with Republicans. Two provisions that would have effectively prohibited the transfer of munitions to the Saudi Arabia-led campaign in Yemen were also dropped, after Mr. Kushner, who helped negotiate the deal, intervened and indicated they were nonstarters for the White House.
Some Democrats were outraged by their party’s concessions, and opposed the final legislation.
“Call me a radical, but maybe before funding a new space force, we should make sure no American goes bankrupt because of a medical bill or dies because they can’t afford to go to a doctor on time,” Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, who is running for president as a Democrat, wrote in a Washington Post op-ed on Monday.