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Playing chicken on war funding |
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By John Fortier
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Posted: 03/27/07 05:27 PM [ET] |
The game of chicken has begun. All previous efforts to express dissatisfaction with the war mean nothing. The real political game is the Iraq supplemental. If it is vetoed or killed in the Senate, someone will be blamed: Republicans for stopping it or Democrats for connecting it to a troop withdrawal.
How the public assigns blame in these high-stakes confrontations is unpredictable. Think of the 1995 budget clash. Republicans, citing strong midterm election results, passed appropriations bills that cut and reshaped government spending, and President Clinton vetoed them because of cuts in programs he favored.
Republicans chose not to pass a continuing resolution to fund the government temporarily, believing that the public would blame President Clinton for the government shutdown. After all, the president could have signed the appropriations measures to fund the government, but he vetoed them.
In the end, Republicans had to back down; contrary to their expectations, the public supported President Clinton, and the whole episode revived the president’s fortunes and set him on the road to reelection.
Fast-forward to today’s showdown. Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) had a big victory last week in passing the Iraq supplemental. She convinced all but a few moderate Democrats to accept a timetable for withdrawal. More difficult was persuading the strongest anti-war supporters to support a bill that would in their minds fund the war for another year and a half. The majority was cobbled together with persuasion, muscle, and pork to grease the skids, but in the end, despite the relative narrow Democratic majority, Pelosi was able to hold her caucus together.
So if a version of the supplemental with a timetable for withdrawal makes it through the Congress to the president’s desk and is vetoed, who will be accused of failing to support the troops?
The best card in the Democrats’ hand is public opinion about the war, which is still a millstone around President Bush’s neck. Polls show that substantial majorities oppose the surge and support troops coming home in not too long a timeframe.
But despite this wind of public opinion at their backs, Democrats cannot count on the public blaming Bush for failing to support the troops if he vetoes funding tied to a mandatory troop withdrawal. First, the House-passed supplemental is too cute; it gives with one hand and takes away with the other. It provides money for troops in the field, but begins to cut back these troops. The president’s position, while not overly popular, is more consistent and comprehensible — support the troops and give them what they need to win.
Second, some will charge that votes were bought with pork. Local projects are often inserted in broader legislation, but special projects look especially unseemly in an otherwise highly principled debate over national-security matters.
Third, Democratic divisions make opposing the president difficult. With a narrow majority and members on the right and left who might desert the coalition, Speaker Pelosi may have difficulty maneuvering in responding to President Bush.
In the end, Democrats are not likely to prevail against President Bush in a veto fight. After all of the political combat, the supplemental that will eventually pass into law will not have a definite date for withdrawal; it may have a recommended timetable, benchmarks, and words of disapproval, but it will not absolutely force the president’s hand.
Ultimately, the course of the war in Iraq will be determined more by the election results in November of 2008 than by the 2007 supplemental vote.
Fortier is a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute. |
