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 3 of 3
The $124 billion spending bill, voted out of the House and Senate on near-partisan lines, sets deadlines that require the withdrawal of US combat forces from Iraq to begin no later than Oct. 1 and to end by a target date of April 1, 2008. It also includes more than $20 billion in spending that the White House says is not needed.
In the recent past, presidents have typically won such standoffs with Capitol Hill. Despite strong public opposition to the war in Vietnam, Congress didn't impose limits on the president's conduct of the war until the very end of that conflict, after the president had already decided to end combat operations. When President Clinton stared down insurgent House Republicans over their proposed spending and tax cuts in 1995, the public blamed Congress for the government shutdown.
Democrats say that's less likely to happen to them, because while the public wanted government services that shut down when the government ran out of money in 1995, they do not want the Iraq war, and will be less likely to punish the party that pulls the plug on it.
"If the president vetoes the emergency spending bill, he's the one who will be denying our troops funding and he's the one who will be denying the American people a path out of Iraq," says Sen. Joseph Biden (D) of Delaware, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and a presidential candidate.
Just two months into the 2003 war in Iraq, the president announced that "major combat operations in Iraq had ended." At the time, nearly 3 in 4 Americans approved of how the president was handling the situation in Iraq.
Reversal of poll numbers on Iraq
Four years and more than 3,300 US combat deaths later, those approval ratings are exactly reversed: Nearly 3 in 4 Americans disapprove of the president's conduct of the war, according to a poll released last week by CBS/New York Times.
Asked who should have the final say about troop levels in Iraq, 57 percent say it should be Congress; only 35 percent say it should be the president, according to the same poll. But pressed to say whether Congress should continue withholding funding after a presidential veto until the president yields, only 36 percent supported that idea and 56 percent opposed it.
Those poll numbers are giving Democrats more confidence in the showdown with the president over funding.
Senate Democratic leaders say that the president can expect it to take most of the month of May to come up with an alternative funding bill. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi says a new bill could come sooner.
"Our goal is to try to achieve this in May, but starting a bill brand new is not easy," says Senator Durbin.
In the end, the outcome "depends on the facts on the ground," he adds. "I give the president the possibility that he's right and we're wrong. The war is what's driving the nation."
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