Given the revelations in the Sunday, March 11th Washington Post on the House Democrats' divisions on Iraq, there is growing reason to doubt anything effective will be done by the new Democratic Congress, despite its November victory, to end the war in Iraq, or, according to late reports, do anything to prevent an attack on Iran.
There is a particularly distressing aspect to the current "debate" among Democrats in the House of Representatives on what to do. As party we do not seem to be able to learn from the successes of conservatives. A major reason Republicans are so united and disciplined is that their leaders are not afraid of going to their rank and file to discipline errant members.
Democrats in Congress are acting as a caucus: Republicans are acting as a party. This is a major reason why they win.
Last November the American people, and Democrats in particular, went to the polls and gave Congress to the Democratic Party in the expectation they would act decisively to do the right thing, and also act in the national interest, to bring the Iraq war to a conclusion. If there are Democratic members of Congress who are seeking to subvert that mandate, then the leadership must act as Republican leaders have in the past. It must expose who those members are so that the people back home who put them into office can bring them back to acting as representatives, not free agents.
We need to understand the consequences of this kind of free agentry. Democrats "won the war" last November in retaking Congress, but now are "losing the peace" because a small number of individual always seem to succeed in dragging the Democratic Party in Congress down to the lowest common denominator. The Republicans lost the election, but they are now about to get their way.
Let us also be honest in who these obstructionists represent: certainly not the people of their districts. If any of the number of bills to end the war by the end of 2007, or even earlier, were put to a referendum in each congressional district, it is doubtful that so much as a single district would vote to continue the war into 2008.
If these spoke-in-the-wheel Democrats are not representing the people of their districts who sent them to Washington, then exactly who do they represent? I think we all know the answer: big money, including companies like Exxon-Mobil, Halliburton, Lockheed-Martin and others that have a vested interest in the war continuing. We've all known for a long time Republicans aren't the only ones with a problem with a "culture of corruption." One only has to look over a list of grantors to the Democratic Leadership Conference to see this problem made manifest.
In the face of an issue of such enormous gravity, both moral and practical, it is well past the time of being "nice guys." It is time for the Democratic leadership to get tough on the miscreants who always seem to be seeking to subvert our party's standing for anything other than cynical calculation, opportunism and rank self-interest. Some members of Congress need to be reminded this is not pro sports. They are not free agents looking for the highest offer. They are the agents of the people who voted for them.
If it comes to it, it would be better to actually lose on a bill to end the war, than vote for the pointless fraud presently being prepared as a solution to ending the war by October 2008. It is the height of naivety to think this bill will perform as claimed, were it actually to be enacted (and it will not). If enacted, Bush will lie in the face of its benchmarks and under his radical theory of a unitary executive he will place a signing statement on it exempting himself from any provision he doesn't care for, which, effectively, would be all of them. By Autumn of 2008 the troops will still be there, which is the Republican plan: dumping the mess on the next president, presumably a Democrat, and then blaming Democrats. What will Congress do when this happens come October 2008? Impeach Bush with three or less months left in his term?
The only answer is to use Congress' budgetary power to cut off the money. If the spoke-in-the-wheel members balk at voting with the people who elected them, Democratic leaders need to go to the nation. The votes will come around, or at least if not this time, then the next. They need to start acting as the leaders of a party, not a caucus.
Obviously, this approach applies not only to the war, but any other number of issues like a single payer healthcare system or curbing CO2 emissions that have powerful monied interests that run contrary to the public interest, but sing a financial siren song some Democrats choose to listen to.