I wish I'd been able to get around to the post sooner, to react in a more timely way to this week's passge of the Iraq War funding bill and the web blog kerfluffle that ensued. As so often happens in my line of work the end of the week, especially before a holiday weekend, can suddenly become very busy. Now that I have time to catch my breath I can reflect on this week's events.
As we all know, earlier this month the Democratic-controlled Congress sent President George W. Bush a war funding bill that would have immposed a timetable for withdrawal on the president. For about one day we were just one signature from being out of Iraq . . . or at least a dramatic curtailment of our involvment in that country's civil war. Then, as promised, George W. Bush vetoed the bill.
At the outset of this battle, many Republicans dared the Democrats to simply withhold funding for the war altogether. Surprisingly, many Democrats fell for this Republican dare, a classic wedge issue if ever there was one.
Some lefty pundits demanded that Congress simply pass the same bill and send it back to the President time and time again. Such demands ignored the fact that the Democratic Party's hold on the Senate is too tenuous for such games. It's time for someone to lay out the facts in a cold and clear fashion, for Democrats and Republicans alike.
Democrats and their independent allies have a 51-to-49 margin in the U.S. Senate. Of the Democrat's 51, one Tim Johnson, is out on sick leave. Another, Joe Lieberman, has allied himself with President Bush on the issue of the War in Iraq. This means that on a straight party line, adjusted for Lieberman, the Democrats start out with a 49-to-50 minority. As if that weren't bad enough, Vice President Dick Cheney gets to cast the deciding vote in the case of any ties. That means that in order to pass the earlier funding bill that Bush vetoed, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had to convince two Republicans to vote with the Democratic Party. Harry Reid was able to pull that off, convincing Chuck Hagel and Gordon Smith to support the bill. Then President Bush vetoed the funding bill and Reid and Pelosi had to start over.
This time around the Senate was so divided by this issue that they couldn't even pass their own version of a funding bill: instead they passed a resolution to support the troops and basically let the House of Representatives draft the next funding bill. After reconciliation, the bill went back to the Senate and House for a vote.
Here's where the story get's weird. It's as if Markos Moulitsas Zúniga and every other regular poster on Daily Kos had suddenly forgotten everything thing they'd ever learned about civics or politics. They forgot that if Democrats refused to fund the military and shut it down the way Newt Gingrich shut the government down in 1995, Democrats would lose much of their public support. They forgot that Joe Lieberman would caucus with the Republican Party, turning control of that chamber over to the Republican Party, along with all of the chairmanships that go along with the control of the majority.
The simple fact of the matter is that Democrats never stood a chance of prevailing this time around. We simply do not have the votes we need in the Senate or the House the overcome a presidential veto, not without the help of a large number of Republicans.
I understood that going in. All I wanted was for Reid and Pelosi to stand up to Bush, to challenge him and force him to make it clear that the only reason we are still at war in Iraq is because the Republican Party demands it. According to recent polls, as many as 76% of Americans oppose the war, and with a little encouragement they might vote in accordance with that belief in 2008.
But Daily Kos, Moveon.org, and other constituencies in the anti-war left kept screaming about a "mandate;" "Congress has a mandate! A mandate to stop the war! Why doesn't Congress stop the war?!!!" Now I am an attorney; I have read the U.S. Constitution once or twice or a hundred times. I am not a constititutional scholar by any means, but, as I said, I've looked the U.S. Constitution over a few times, and I haven't seen anything in there about "mandates." Specifically, I don't know of any section of the Constitution that says "any party that wins a simple majority of both houses of Congress shall have a 'mandate' and then can do pretty much what it or Daily Kos wants to."
Which makes the meltdown at Daily Kos this week so inexplicable to me. It was the largest temper tantrum I've ever seen and it culminated with threats by the Daily Kos community to bring the Democratic Party down. I've never seen anything like it, and I hope I never see it again. The idea that a supposedly Liberal community could blame the Democratic Party for failing to achieve what it did not have the votes to achieve is the very height of irresponsibility.
The only victory George W. Bush won in this battle was the one handed to him by Daily Kos when it fell for the Republican wedge issue of defunding. In every other respect, Bush and the Republican Party emerged from this debate as losers, as I will demonstrate in my next posts on this subject.