The only people who actually know what’s going on regarding the supplemental appropriations bill on Iraq are insiders and those with a good connection to a few of them. The rest of us can only guess based on what we’re reading from suspect sources. And, because coming up with a supplemental bill is a process until it becomes a product, the situation can change from morning to afternoon, if not hour to hour. What may have been true yesterday, or at noon today, may not be the case at the moment.
Here’s what being said right now by MSNBC:
Flinching in the face of a veto threat, Democratic congressional leaders neared agreement with the Bush administration Tuesday on legislation to pay for the Iraq war without setting a timeline for troop withdrawal.
Several officials said the emerging compromise bill would cost about $120 billion, including as much as $8 billion for Democratic domestic priorities such as disaster relief for Hurricane Katrina victims and farmers hurt by drought.
Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., says the exact wording of the deal has not been finalized. Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., is expected to formally present the deal to her caucus late this afternoon.
After a bruising veto struggle over war funding, congressional leaders in both political parties said they hoped the compromise would be cleared for President Bush's signature by Friday.
Despite the concession, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., told reporters that the legislation would be the first war-funding bill sent to Bush since the U.S. invasion of Iraq "where he won't get a blank check."
Sorry, Senator. As near as I can see, this bill will be a blank check, exactly what for the past few days some of us have been predicting. All the pretending otherwise won’t make it less so. Mister Bush will get what he wants - the money - and the American people will get phony reports about how things are getting better and waiverable benchmarks are being met. As I wrote last week, capitulation by installments.
As the neoconservative Max Boot wrote today in the The New York Times:
But we shouldn’t kid ourselves that even in the unlikely event that all these bills are approved by September, they will mark a turning point in the war. At best they will give Gen. David H. Petraeus and President Bush some signs of progress they can point to in arguing for more patience from the American public to give the "surge" a chance to work.
More patience. For those elected Democrats who still don’t get it, what this means is that Mister Bush and his mentors and minions expect to run out the clock until they can wash their hands of the occupation come January 2009. They will come back in July and September and point to a few "successes" in the splurge of blood and bucks, and try to persuade enough in Congress to stick with the program for another few months.
Many believe that because of widespread Republican grumbling that we will see widespread Republican defections in September. No doubt a few of the most moderate, most politically endangered in the GOP may jump ship then. But, anybody who thinks we can get 17 Republicans in the Senate and 60 in the House (not to mention collect those Democrats who so far have been enabling Bush with their "nay" votes on cloture for Feingold-Reid and the McGovern bill) are whistling past the grave yard.
If the supplemental bill – with its ludicrous, waiverable benchmarks - is passed, the Iraq occupation is funded through the rest of this fiscal year, through September 30. And the new fiscal year, which starts October 1, will include enough funding in the overall Defense appropriation to pay for yet another 12 months of the occupation. Chances of cutting funding in the overall Defense appropriation – with its election-year risk of being considered "weak on defense" - is next to nil.
Unlike many Kossacks, I sympathize with the Democratic leadership when it comes to Iraq. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi have difficult situations. You can twist arms, make threats, pressure, cajole and otherwise try to cobble together a majority from Blue Dogs and conservatives like the Nelsons, Pryor, Landrieu and others, but, ultimately, you can’t shout your way to victory. The Speaker or Majority Leader cannot force anybody to vote the way they personally wish. I cannot, however, sympathize when they present this ugly compromise as some kind of victory, as legislation that will do anything to curb Mister Bush. It is anything but.
In the past month, we’ve seen a majority of House Democrats and a smaller majority of Senate Democrats favor three pieces of legislation that - while far from as strong as they should have been – would have put the onus on Mister Bush for continuing the occupation. Good for them. If only there were more like them.
If the latest legislation is as it appears to be, a toothless, gutless, spineless bill that gives Mister Bush his blank check, Democrats who vote for it are essentially buying the occupation.
Voting "nay" on such a conference bill is the best course of action for those 29 Senators and 169 Representatives who voted for cloture on Feingold-Reid and for the McGovern bill. I urge them to do so. They will not succeed in stopping it. But they will at least remind their fellow Democrats of how a majority party ought to behave when faced with an intransigent President whose unfettered policies and actions will mean the deaths and maiming of tens of thousands of Americans and Iraqis over the next 20 months.