This week’s lopsided, bipartisan vote passing the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act in the House of Representatives caps a series of wins for U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn.

The Colorado Springs Republican, who chairs a key subcommittee on the House Armed Services Committee, claims more than 50 provisions in the massive, $886 billion defense bill, known as the NDAA – from establishing a nuclear sea-launched missile program and expanding hypersonic weaponry testing to advancing a genealogy program involving service members killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Members of the hard-line House Freedom Caucus blasted the final version of the bill after congressional leaders stripped the chamber’s Republican-backed provisions – including a ban on the military paying for service members to travel to obtain abortions – and added an extension of the government’s spying powers under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, but Lamborn pushed back, saying it’s important to count the victories.

“Through this bill, conservatives have achieved major wins that counter harmful Biden administration plans to treat our military like a social experiment,” Lamborn said on the House floor on Dec. 14. “However, we must continue to make necessary investments in our strategic forces. We must prepare to simultaneously address two peer aggressors, as well as deter the growing threats from Iran and North Korea. And this bill does that. I urge my colleagues to support the bill to ensure our men and women in uniform have the resources they need to defend our nation.”

Add to that the Biden administration’s decision this summer to locate the permanent headquarters of U.S. Space Command in Colorado Springs – reversing an order issued by former President Donald Trump to move the military branch to Huntsville, Alabama – and Lamborn is on track to finish his 17th year in Congress in the catbird seat.

It’s been a rocky few years up to this point for Lamborn, including the years-long limbo when Space Command’s fate hung in the balance. He also faced a lawsuit from a former congressional aide, who alleged that Lamborn and his office downplayed the risks of COVID, leaned on staffers to perform personal tasks for the congressman and his family, and at one point allowed Lamborn’s adult son to live rent-free in the Capitol. While an ethics investigation spawned by the lawsuit is still pending, Lamborn and his former staffer settled the lawsuit at the beginning of the year. Although they didn’t disclose the settlement’s terms, Lamborn maintained that he and his office “used best efforts to comply with all legal and ethical requirements.”

In a recent, wide-ranging interview, Lamborn talked about the House’s mixed record in a tumultuous year and what he characterized as the sometimes harsh realities of crafting legislation that can make it to the president’s desk.

In his ninth term, the veteran legislator has served in Congress longer than all but one member of Colorado’s delegation, U.S. Rep. Diana DeGette, the Denver Democrat who got to Washington a decade before Lamborn arrived.

Discussing the compromises that yielded the final NDAA, which passed the House on Dec. 14 on a vote of 311-117, Lamborn said there’s no getting around simple math.

“The Senate took out some of the good work that we had done in the House,” he said. “Like, they left some of what we did against wokeism and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), but they did not adopt everything we’ve done in the House. So, the Senate version is not as good as the House version. However, in other regards, the Senate version still accomplishes a lot of the things that we need to for the defense of our country, like paying our servicemen and women, for instance. So, even though the conference report – which hammered out differences between the House and the Senate – found an in-between version between the House and the Senate, I view that as necessary for our country’s defense.”

Lamborn said there’s no way around the fact that Democrats control the Senate, albeit by a “slender majority,” with 51 Democrats to 49 Republicans, and Vice President Kamala Harris on hand to break ties.

“And so we were not able to promote all of our initiatives from the House that we wanted to, and I don’t know how Mike Johnson can change the Senate vote,” Lamborn said, referring to the Louisiana Republican who sits in the speaker’s chair.

“He doesn’t have that power. The senators are very independent. They make their votes. And it’s really not an option to say we’re not going to pass a bill funding our nation’s defense if we don’t get our way on everything. That’s not going to fly.”

Lamborn said he’s optimistic that the fractious House can pass appropriations bills when lawmakers return next year, though Republicans hold nearly as slim a majority as Democrats do in the Senate, made smaller by this month’s expulsion of New Yorker George Santos and this week’s departure of California Republican Kevin McCarthy, who lost the speaker’s gavel in October.

“I don’t have a crystal ball, and I can’t guarantee that it’s going to happen, because there’s a lot of things that can go haywire,” Lamborn said. “But I’m hoping that we can get rid of these continuing resolutions and actually fund our government.”

Lamborn cheered this month’s decision by Alabama Republican Sen. Tommy Tuberville to release most of the blanket holds he’d put on military promotions in an attempt to cancel the Pentagon’s policy of paying for travel for service members seeking abortions.

“I am glad,” Lamborn said. “I respect his desire to stop the funding or the provision of travel to military members who want an abortion. I think that that’s an improper use of taxpayer dollars, ultimately, but he would have been, I think, better advised to go after the people who made that policy or who were implicated in carrying out that policy, and not just have a universal hold on every promotion in the military. I think that that was overreaching on his part.”

Although 105 Republicans joined nearly all House Democrats voting to expel Santos on Dec. 1, Lamborn wasn’t among them.

Only the sixth House member to be expelled in the chamber’s history, Santos was shown the door following a scathing report by the House Ethics Committee that found the serial fabulist had misspent campaign funds on lavish personal expenses. He faces 23 felony charges on similar allegations.

Referring to his former colleague as “one sleazy guy,” Lamborn explained his vote.

“If the accounts are to be believed, the allegations against him are very serious, and he’s potentially done some criminal acts that are going to land him in prison,” Lamborn said. “But he has not been found guilty in a criminal court, so I figured it was premature to expel him from Congress. We really haven’t done that before. And this was a step in a direction that I don’t want to see become a slippery slope.”

Lamborn did, however, vote later to censure New York Democrat Jamal Bowman for pulling a fire alarm while the House was in session, which drew a misdemeanor conviction.

This week, House Republicans voted unanimously to authorize an impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden over strenuous objections by Democrats that the move was a baseless, political stunt.

Saying lawmakers can “chew gum and walk at the same time,” Lamborn dismissed a suggestion that the House was consumed with conflict at the expense of tackling pressing issues.

“We’re spending a lot of time on the really important, bread and butter issues like the NDAA for instance, and appropriation bills,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to only spend time on these disciplinary matters, but we’re not – we’re doing other vital things simultaneously.”

As the GOP’s House majority dwindles and frustrated lawmakers head for the exits – at last count, seven senators and 33 House member had announced their retirement – Lamborn allowed that it was an open question whether the chamber is governable.

“Well, it’s not governable if people are not team players, and if they are not rational about tackling problems that can actually be solved,” he said. “If we’re tilting at windmills, as some people are prone to do, then that is a diversion that ends up wasting everyone’s time and is not productive.”

Asked for an example of windmill-tilting, Lamborn returned to the defense bill.

“The House version is more hard-hitting on some of the social issues than the Senate version, and the conference committee is somewhere in between,” he said. “But people think that they can force the Senate to vote the way they want from over here in the House, and it would be tilting at windmills if they shut down the government to try to accomplish that, or if they refused to support national defense by (not) voting for the NDAA or for defense appropriations early next year.”

Added Lamborn: “If they think that that will change the Senate’s mind, that’s tilting at windmills, because they’ve proven before that they have their own independent way of thinking. And we have to find somewhere in between the two positions, instead of forcing them to adopt our position without any changes whatsoever. Expecting the Senate to adopt House positions is tilting at windmills when they are an independent body.”