WaPo:
Defense Secretary Robert Gates said Sunday he would recommend a veto of a Senate proposal that would give troops more rest between deployments in Iraq, branding it a dangerous "backdoor way" to draw down forces.
Democrats pledged to push ahead with the plan by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., and expressed confidence they could round up the votes to pass it, although perhaps not by the margin to override a veto.
Gates was asked in broadcast interviews about recommending a veto to Bush should the proposal pass. "Yes I would," the Pentagon chief said.
"If it were enacted, we would have force management problems that would be extremely difficult and, in fact, affect combat effectiveness and perhaps pose greater risk to our troops," he said.
OK, no news (as such) in that. It's always been clear that Bush opposed operating within the framework adopted by actual military commanders that made the schedule Webb proposes the preferred minimum requirements. That's because giving service members the rest and training time the top military brass actually thinks they need outside of combat zones would deprive the Pretzelnit of his ability to kill troops faster and award himself imaginary medals for it.
So Bush will veto any measure that holds out even the possibility that service men and women might end up spending equal time in combat and out. They simply must be forced to spend more time under fire. After all, we paid for their college!
But here's something else. Look at this meme that's quietly slipped into the Conventional Wisdom:
Supporters of Webb's proposal say it has at least 57 of the 60 votes needed for passage. It would need 67 votes to override a veto.
Now, at first, that might just strike you as sloppy writing. The "60 votes needed for passage" really refers to the 60 votes needed to invoke cloture on a Republican filibuster, so that the Senate can vote on the measure, which would actually need just 51 votes to pass. Right?
Maybe not.
For one thing, even if it's just sloppiness, the framing perpetuates the notion that everything brought to a vote in the Senate will automatically be subject to a filibuster. Which at least has the potential advantage of making Republican obstructionism that much more obvious -- yet you'll notice there's no mention of that in this (or really any other) article.
But the truth is that it may not be sloppiness at all, but entirely accurate. More and more, the Senate has been forging unanimous consent agreements that essentially codify the filibuster, by securing the agreement of both sides ahead of time that 60 votes actually will be required to pass certain legislation.
That was the case with the truly atrocious FISA bill the Senate crammed down the House's throat and then skipped town on. And while at first glance it might strike you as a good idea to require more votes in order to pass something so horrible, it's actually a very insidious way of allowing the minority to build a pain-free filibuster into almost any bill they want, which is arguably precisely the opposite of what Senate Democrats ought to be doing right now. A filibuster, especially on measures related to The 25% Solution (a/k/a Iraq), ought to be as painful as possible for the Dead Enders in the Senate. This arrangement instead makes filibusters practically invisible, and easier than ever.