The Senate version of the supplemental appropriations bill, including $37 billion for the continuation of the war in Afghanistan, has been passed by the House, by a vote of 308-114. The line in the sand drawn by retiring Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey (D-WI-07) has been utterly obliterated, and there can be no doubt but that there is a remains a very large pro-war majority in the Congress. This despite stories which ran claims like this one, just three weeks ago:
If you asked the House of Representatives right now to approve $37 billion to continue the war in Afghanistan indefinitely without a plan in place for winding it down, the answer would be “no.” But through some carefully considered procedural maneuvering last night, Democratic leaders in the House managed to pass their war spending bill, reject attempts at setting a withdrawal timeline, enact a broad budget enforcement resolution that will guide all discretionary spending for 2011, and even throw in billions of dollars (fully offset) in unrelated domestic spending.
Today, the answer is a resounding "yes," and this despite the fact that the product of that carefully considered procedural maneuvering has been systematically abandoned piece by piece until literally none of it remained.
The war continues. It gets more money than ever. And despite the promises made by everybody running everywhere for every seat in every branch of the federal government not to fund the wars through supplemental appropriations ever again, this is the second year in a row we've done just that. Last year perhaps didn't "count," since it was a supplemental for fiscal year 2009, for which the planning was done in 2008 (i.e., under the Bush administration), but there's no doubting who's responsible for fiscal year 2010. It is what it is.