Tension rises in Washington over war-funding bill standoff
Congress is eyeing three strategies after an all-but-certain White House veto of the Iraq war bill.
from the April 30, 2007 edition
Page 2 of 3
"I'm quite optimistic that Congress will provide the necessary funds in a timely way for the troops," says Sen. John Warner (R) of Virginia, the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. He says he is developing a post-veto deal with centrists on both sides of the aisle.
"I have the elements in my pocket," he said, after the Senate voted 51-46 for the $124 billion emergency spending bill last Thursday.
Another option, favored by top House appropriators, is to pass a bill to fund the war for two months, and reevaluate after the president's "surge" is fully implemented. Bush administration officials say that a short-term fix doesn't give the Pentagon the flexibility it needs to prosecute the war.
A third option is to stand pat, pressuring the White House to yield or face a funding cutoff. This strategy could also force Republicans in Congress to vote for politically unpopular measures.
"The closer it gets to elections in 2008, the more focused the Republicans in the Senate will be on this issue," says Sen. Richard Durbin (D) of Illinois, the deputy Democratic leader. "They have to decide if they want to take the president's position as their party position into the election."
For now, Democrats still support the view that the president should just sign the bill.
"It's a great bill. The president should read it and sign it," says Rep. John Murtha (D) of Pennsylvania, who chairs the House panel that drafts defense spending bills. A longtime strong supporter of the military, his repudiation of his 2002 vote supporting the use of force in Iraq gave a congressional face to the antiwar movement.
Mr. Murtha and some other antiwar Democrats are eyeing the third option – that Congress opt to do nothing after a presidential veto and thus force a quick end to the war.
Bush has veto but needs funds
The president has the votes to sustain a veto on Capitol Hill, but that still leaves him without funding to prosecute his war, Murtha says.
"For some time, the assumption has been that eventually Democrats would have to go along with some kind of funding, absent timetables," says John Pitney, a political scientist at Claremont-McKenna College in Claremont, Calif.
"But it's possible that that isn't true, especially with reports that the administration is putting off its evaluation of the surge until September," he adds. "At some time, the public patience will run out."
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