So I've got one more uncomfortable point to make about the war supplemental, the rule, and the approval of war money. This one has to do with the decision to trade additional domestic spending as a sweetener for war funding.
This analysis grew out of the claim frequently heard from anti-war activists that voting for the rule was a good as voting for the war funding, a claim which walks the fine line between truth and falsehood in part because of the complexity of the procedure used to move the bill along. But of course, the complexity of the procedure was in turn necessary in order to give each faction of the Democratic Caucus (the only side with divided priorities regarding the war) a shot at a vote on its position.
There's a sense in which it can be said that voting for the rule enables the war funding to move forward. It's not far-fetched, but it comes with some logical problems. It's true that defeating the rule would at least have temporarily blocked war funding from moving forward. It would have blocked it because it would have prevented the leadership from bringing the motion to agree to the Senate amendment (which added the war funding) to the floor. But as we've discussed, in practice the most likely response would have been for the leadership to seek an alternative rule to bring the same motion to the floor, rather than seeking to change the way they would deal with the Senate's amendment.
But if it's the preferred position of the anti-war activists who advocated against the rule that any vote which enables the war funding is a pro-war vote, then the same logic has to apply across the board. While anti-war champions in the House were ultimately unsuccessful in defeating the rule, and no one realistically expected any of the war funding limitation amendments to pass, the fact is that the rule gave anti-war forces one additional opportunity to defeat the funding with as much effect as defeating the rule would have afforded.
Here's the key language from the rule itself:
The previous question shall be considered as ordered on the motion to final adoption without intervening motion or demand for division of the question except that the question of adoption of the motion shall be divided among the five House amendments. The first portion of the divided question shall be considered as adopted. If the remaining portions of the divided question fail of adoption, then the House shall be considered to have rejected the motion and to have made no disposition of the Senate amendment to the text.
I've bolded the crucial part. What it's telling you is that if all four of the amendments that got individual votes fail, then the House will have rejected the motion to agree to the Senate amendment.
As I said, everyone expected the three war-funding amendments to fail. But then again, everyone expected the additional domestic spending to pass. That was the price most Democrats wanted to extract for permitting the war funding to go forward. And they wanted it so much that they were willing to see the war funding blocked (at least temporarily) if they didn't get that domestic spending.
But the bottom line remains that if the domestic funding amendment had failed as well, there would have been no war funding agreed to in the House last Thursday.
And yet, the only Democratic votes against that domestic funding amendment, save one, were Blue Dog types and their sympathizers. I count one anti-war stalwart among those voting no: Peter Welch of Vermont. And I don't even know for sure why he did it, given that he also voted for the rule.
But once again, if a vote for the rule is a vote to fund the war, then given the foreknowledge that the other three amendments would fail (and everyone was well aware that that would be the outcome), a vote for summer jobs programs, oil spill cleanup, teacher retention, Pell Grants, etc. is... a vote to fund the war.
That's the unfortunate but logical extension of the rule = war funding position. And that's going to put some of the biggest anti-war champions in the House on the wrong side of the issue for one of two possible reasons:
- They didn't read and fully understand the rule themselves, or;
- They knew what the likely outcome would be, and decided to trade war funding for the chance to fund some domestic priorities, too.
Now that might be a perfectly logical and defensible position to take. I happen to think so, in that the likeliest response to a defeat of the rule or of the motion would have been to come back with a rule simply agreeing to the Senate amendment, which would be the worst of the possible outcomes from what might ordinarily be thought of as the progressive standpoint. But the rule says what it says. And that means the only position consistent with the view that the rule ought to have been voted down from the left is that the domestic funding ought to have shared the same fate.
Interestingly, the only Democrats to actually vote that position were five hard core Blue Dogs (Bright, Herseth Sandlin, Marshall, Skelton and Taylor). Absolutely no anti-war Democrats joined them.
I guess we'll have to hope that that extra domestic spending survives whatever comes next, whether that be conference with the Senate or additional amendments.