California women have firm grip in House panel that oversees military | McClatchy Washington Bureau

A trio of California congresswomen has become a political power center in the congressional oversight of America’s military, exercising unheralded influence over federal priorities from their seats representing the largest population of service members in the country.

Reps. Susan Davis, a San Diego Democrat, Loretta Sanchez, a Democrat from Santa Ana, and Jackie Speier, from Hillsborough in San Mateo County, are just three of the 63 lawmakers who make up the House Armed Services Committee. But by virtue of their roles as the senior Democrats on subcommittees that oversee military personnel policies, weapons purchases and investigations into wartime spending, they are particularly influential.

That female power troika will stay intact for only a few more months. Sanchez, who will face Kamala Harris in November in an all-Democrat general election for the Senate seat of the retiring Barbara Boxer, is leaving the House of Representatives. The leading contender to replace her is Democrat Lou Correa, a man.

Their combined influence in recent years has been important at a time when gender roles in the military and the amount of money tied to California’s defense industry are in flux, said Mark Peterson, the chairman of the department of public policy at the University of California Los Angeles.

Speier and Davis are expected to return to the House in November. Speier faces no opposition in the fall, and Davis finished first handily in Tuesday’s primary, with 65 percent of the vote.

“We now have more women in the military,” Peterson said. “We now have more women moving into combat positions. We have more women in the military who have particular kinds of health needs and demands, and if you didn’t have women on that committee, then that probably would not be very well represented.”

That’s particularly true for California, which is home to the largest military population in the United States: 168,820 active-duty members and 61,986 military civilians, according to a data sheet compiled by Governing magazine. Virginia, with 129,699 military members, has the second largest population of active-duty men and women.

“If you didn’t have Californians on that committee, then the perspective of this particular state would be less well represented,” Peterson said.

The influence of the three Californians is multiplied because they have a history of voting the same way on amendments to defense authorization bills. The trio voted together nearly 90 percent of the time on the 102 amendments offered to military spending bills for fiscal years 2014, 2015, 2016 and 2017, according to House records.

That includes the one to the 2017 defense authorization bill that would have required women ages 18 to 26 to register for any future wartime draft. The House Rules Committee dropped the amendment in May.

The amount of interest the amendment generated clearly shows that there needs to be a debate over the role women can play in the military, Davis said.

“Now that we have women who can serve in positions that they were withheld from in the past, particularly front-line positions, then we need to adjust by law the way that we develop the Selective Service bill,” said Davis, who is the senior Democrat on the Subcommittee on Military Personnel, which oversees pay and other benefits for active-duty personnel and reservists. “And so we think that it’s important to do that and to show that women can certainly register for the Selective Service, as do men. They share the same interests in being there for their country if and when needed.”

“Not every woman makes a great soldier, but neither does every man,” said Sanchez, the ranking Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees ground and air weapons acquisitions. “So let’s just have everybody sign up.”

Speier, the senior Democrat on the subcommittee that oversees investigations of fraud, waste and abuse, was not available for comment.

Occasionally the trio is divided on issues, even though Davis and Sanchez are roommates on Capitol Hill and often discuss those subjects in private. For example, in June 2013 the three disagreed on whether to put a spending limit on the number of F-35 jets the Pentagon could buy. That year, the Pentagon grounded the jets after engine inspectors found a crack on a turbine blade.

Davis was against limiting the funds for the multi-billion-dollar aircraft program, but Sanchez and Speier voted to cap the amount the military could spend on the warplanes.

Sanchez said cost overruns had influenced her vote. The “overly ambitious” aircraft buy plan did not deserve additional financial backing at that point, she said. In fact, it remains a poster child for “how not to run a program,” she said.

“We’ve seen the costs escalate by (700), 800, 900 percent,” she said, adding that the program was “seven years or eight years, well, about seven years behind schedule.”

“And we’ve had all sorts of issues, including vendor production lines that needed to be kept open even though there weren’t planes being built.”

California has benefited in a big way from the program, according to an interactive data map constructed by contractor Lockheed Martin. That data shows that the program has a direct and indirect effect on 21,770 jobs and about a $10.5 billion impact on the state’s economy.

Joe DellaVedova, spokesman for the military’s F-35 Joint Program Office, acknowledged that the program initially faced various challenges but said it had been making “solid progress” in recent years.

“There have been delays, cost overruns and technical issues; however, the mark of a good program is how you overcome obstacles and solve programs,” he said.

More recently, the California three disagreed on legislation that would have disbanded the Guantánamo detention center for suspected terrorists in Cuba. Davis and Speier voted in May to close the facility, while Sanchez was one of only 19 Democrats who voted against the measure, because she wanted to see a better plan for relocating the remaining prisoners.

Only once in four years did one of the three miss a vote. Congressional records show that Sanchez was absent this year during a controversial vote on whether to extend the authority to provide assistance to the Syrian opposition. The vast majority of committee members voted against the measure, including Davis and Speier.

Whether working in unison now or divided by political ambitions in the future, the nexus of power that the three lawmakers have created in their corner of the House Armed Services Committee is undeniable. But that power isn’t typically something that any of them dwell on, Sanchez said.

“We don’t think of ourselves as power players,” she said. “I guess we’re just working away. That’s usually the way women look at themselves. We’re just plodding away and getting this done.”