The annual defense spending bill is usually passed and signed by the president by now, but not this year.

Senate Republicans voted against ending the debate on their version of the National Defense Authorization Act on Monday, creating an obstacle for Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, who had waited until late November to bring it to the floor.

At the heart of the dispute between Democrats and Republicans are the amendments that have, and more importantly haven’t, been debated on and considered.

Sen. Tommy Tuberville, an Alabama Republican who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, accused the Democrats of wanting “to rush everything through and wait till the last minute and use Christmas as a timeline.”

With other major legislation pending and needing its own time on the Senate floor, Democrats “stacked it up like a backed-up four-lane highway here in Washington, D.C., in the month of December,” Tuberville told the Washington Examiner in an interview.

Sen. Jim Inhofe, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, made similar remarks on the Senate floor just before Monday’s 45-51 failed vote. Schumer is trying to “jam [the bill] through the Senate without adequate consideration” and an “open and robust” debate on the amendments to the legislation, he said.

This is the fifth latest the NDAA has come up in its six-decade history, according to a Senate aide.

Eric Edelman, previously undersecretary of defense for policy and a Vandenberg Coalition board member, told the Washington Examiner that Schumer “was probably calculating that at the end of the day, Republicans would want to pass the NDAA, and therefore, he could get away with kind of jamming it down their throats — the way he's been trying to do with the minimum number of amendments to be debated.” He described the situation as a “miscalculation.”

On Nov. 19, the Senate was supposed to debate and vote on 19 key amendments. However, the process was derailed by Republican senators who raised objections because their amendments were not being considered.

One of the amendments not yet considered, which Republicans have highlighted, would apply sanctions to the company behind the Nord Stream II, a natural gas line from Russia to Germany that some experts believe will provide Russian President Vladimir Putin with a leg up on Europe.

The topic of the pipeline comes amid an increasingly bleak outlook between the United States and Russia, with Secretary of State Antony Blinken accusing Putin of preparing to invade Ukraine on Wednesday.

Tuberville pointed to this amendment and another regarding the wall along the southern border when asked about which ones he most wants to debate.

“We’ve tried everything with the administration to try to get this done, and they won’t do it,” Sen. Jim Risch, the top Republican on the Foreign Relations Committee and the lawmaker behind the amendment, told Politico. “So I don’t know what you do with somebody when they won’t follow the law. You gotta keep hammering that, and that’s what we’re doing.”

A White House official told the Washington Examiner that the Republicans' position on the issue "makes no sense."

“The administration is working with Congress on a legislative package of sanctions in the event Russia invades Ukraine further, looking at how to maximize potential costs to Russia while maintaining strong trans-Atlantic unity," the official added. "But we’re seeing some members of Congress press for sanctions that don’t actually deter Russia but do threaten trans-Atlantic unity in order to score political points at home — all while holding up critical national security funding on a range of unrelated issues."

Now that Republicans have prevented the bill from moving forward, Schumer will have to make a deal with the other side of the aisle, almost assuredly in the form of considering additional amendments. In one reported proposal that surfaced on Tuesday, the Senate would debate 21 amendments, though that appears to have fallen through.