COUNTERPOINT: Vote To Change The Course

[babylonsister]

http://thinkprogress.org/2007/05/23/counterpoint-on-iraq-supp/

COUNTERPOINT: Vote To Change The Course

Our guest blogger, Denis McDonough, is a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress and was formerly a foreign policy adviser to Sen. Tom Daschle from 2000 to 2004. He disagrees with our position that Congress must reject the supplemental.



Congress should vote to enact the FY07 Supplemental, and progressives who have forced the President to change course on Iraq should vote for it. For the first time in the 5 years since the war started, the President is being forced to change course and accept something other than a blank check. He is now forced to respond to verifiable benchmarks — the fact of which Secretary Gates used on his recent trip.

The fact is that despite the hand wringing now, we all knew it would be near impossible to get the super-majorities needed in to enact hard and fast timelines for redeployment from Iraq. In fact, it was widely commented that the bare majorities in the House and Senate to pass the initial conference report were a triumph of leadership, given that the Senate Democratic Caucus could count on 49 votes and the House Democrats only 231.

Many critics of the current deal — ThinkProgress included — now suggest Congress should have somehow gotten more. They critique the inclusion of a waiver on the political benchmarks, though waivers have become standard in Congressional legislation on foreign affairs over the last several decades, so much so that even wildly popular laws enacted with overwhelming support, like the Jerusalem Embassy Act, retain waiver authority for the president.

Other critics suggest Congress should have simply kept sending the President a bill to veto, while existing funding runs out. One analysis suggested that the Food and Forage Act of 1861 would have given the President the authority to feed and arm the troops in the field, provided, of course, the President wanted to do so. A separate analysis of the same law suggested the President could simply choose to spend money to continue the war if the Congress failed to enact the supplemental — an actual occurrence of which CAP pointed out in an analysis we prepared earlier this year.

Whether you think the President might do the right thing or the wrong thing, it makes no sense for the Congress to abdicate its power of the purse, especially to this Administration on this issue.

At the end of the day, precedent demonstrates that Congress will be able to stop the war only when it has the votes to force the President to back down. Given Democratic votes alone cannot get this done, the President can only be forced to back down when significant numbers of his own party desert him in Congress. As we argued in a recent CAP paper — which ThinkProgress also used to support its case — this is going to be a prolonged effort that will require many rounds.

The good news for those who want to end the war in a way that protects our interests, there will be many more opportunities — in the Defense Authorization bill, the Defense Appropriations Bill and the FY 08 supplemental to do just that.

– Denis McDonough