Best Bet to End the War
In yesterday’s immortal words of Harry Reid, “Keep in mind the progress we have made.†To the naked eye, in four months, Congress has gone from failing to pass non-binding resolutions against the war to quibbling over non-binding benchmarks in a bill to fund it. At this rate, we should be out of Iraq by never.
From the start, attempts to de-fund were going to founder on Presidential vetoes upheld by enough Congressional Republicans who aren’t terrified yet by the prospect of losing their seats next year.
So after all the posturing by Democratic “leaders,†bobbing and weaving by Presidential candidates and outrage from disappointed bystanders (pace Keith Olbermann), we are back to one legislative hope–rescinding the 2002 Congressional authorization to invade Iraq.
That’s a long and bumpy road that could end at the doorway of the Supreme Court, but as Robert Byrd has been saying all along, it’s the best possible hope for undoing the damage he and a few other lonely souls were warning against back then.
After all the gabble over appropriations ends this week, Democrats who want to stop this damn war rather then venting and politicking about it should concentrate on getting the recission resolution moving. By the time they pass it, enough Republicans may be in an ’08 panic to make it veto-proof.
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8 Responses to “Best Bet to End the War”
Wow, Larry Houle knows very very little about Iraq.
Agreed, Entropy.
Please do not feed, acknowledge, encourage, bait, tease, respond to, argue with, or look at the troll.
What troll?
The Dems period don’t have the political muscle to stop the war. They can only propose things to the president which he can then veto. The president still has the power to continue on as he pleases. All the democrats can do is stop all funding and end up looking like the guys that shut the gov’t down when really its the fault of an idiot president.
Sam,
No, it would not shut the government down. The war is funded through supplementals. No supplemental, no war.
As much as the Dems are being berated by everyone on the left and the right, I think they did the best thing possible.
The day the surge was introduced was the day their fate re the supplemental was sealed. To continue sending bills with benchmarks to the WH only to heve them repeatedly vetoed would have taken on the character of a charade.
Even had they been able to defund the war now, American folklore, via Republican talking points, would be full of the war that could have been won if only the surge was allowed to play its course.
I think the Democrats did well.
Now we wait.
At least they are trying. What I don’t get is that everyone seems to expect them to be able to bring Bush to his knees, when they have no real majority in the Senate and a slim one in the House. They want the Democrats to take on the political risk for other peoples mistakes. It would be political suicide. Bush would love to palm the entire blame for this fiasco onto them, as it was in Vietnam. But historians know that LBJ, and McNamara were to blame for Vietnam.