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The House passed a nearly $612 billion defense policy bill Friday despite President Barack Obama's veto threat and Democratic worries that the measure opens the door to sharp cuts in domestic spending later this year.

The vote was 269-151 for the bill, which maps next year's military and national security programs. It would also preserve for another year the fleet of A-10 attack planes that supports hundreds of jobs at Selfridge Air National Guard Base in Macomb County, said U.S. Rep. Candice Miller, R-Harrison Township.

The bill's final version incorporated amendments Friday from two members of Michigan's delegation, including a request that President Barack Obama to exercise "all available authorities" to evacuate U.S. citizens and nationals from Yemen as soon as possible.

"There are United States citizens in Yemen with nowhere to turn," said U.S. Rep. Debbie Dingell, D-Dearborn, whose district includes the country's highest concentration of Yemeni Americans. "My constituents and their families stuck in Yemen need hope, and they need to know that American citizens are not being forgotten."

A measure by U.S. Rep. Tim Walberg, R-Tipton, would require the independent government watchdog responsible for auditing U.S. spending on Afghanistan's reconstruction certify that he has sufficient access to Afghan ministry accounts to guarantee effective audits.

"We must ensure that every dollar is spent effectively," said Walberg, who sits on the House panel on oversight and government reform.

The defense bill that passed skirts those limits by putting $89 billion of the total into an emergency war-fighting fund, which is exempt from the caps placed on defense and domestic spending in 2011. Democrats predict that Republicans won't attempt to do end-runs around the spending caps when it comes to domestic spending.

Rep. Adam Smith of Washington state, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, urged his colleagues to vote against the bill.

"It doesn't fix the problem," Smith said. "The president has promised to veto all the appropriations bills and the defense bill that are based on this flawed approach to the budget. So what we are doing here is ultimately not going to be successful until we come up with a better long-term solution to dealing with the budget caps."

Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, has acknowledged in recent days that the approach is not the best way to "run a railroad."

But he urged the Democrats Friday to vote for the bill anyhow by quoting the last line of an editorial published Friday in The Washington Post: "Far better for him (Obama), and his party's leadership in Congress to help an adequate defense budget keep moving through Congress rather than perpetuate a fight all Americans, whether Republican or Democrat, might later regret."

Overall, the House bill authorizes $515 billion in spending for national defense and another $89.2 billion for the emergency war-fighting fund for a total of $604.2 billion. Another $7.7 billion is mandatory defense spending that doesn't get authorized by Congress. That means the bill would provide the entire $611.9 billion desired by the president, but he and Democratic lawmakers still oppose it.

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