The meeting — the president insisted it was not a negotiation — between congressional leaders and Bush at the White House yesterday went off without a hitch. The president said he would veto anything that isn’t a blank check, while congressional Dems said they’d pass anything but a blank check.
Moving closer to a showdown over funding the war in Iraq, President Bush and congressional Democratic leaders emerged from a much-anticipated White House meeting Wednesday without progress toward ending an impasse over an emergency spending bill.
Despite Bush’s veto threat, the Democrats continued to press ahead with legislation that would force the administration to begin withdrawing U.S. forces from Iraq.
“We cannot give the president a blank check,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-San Francisco) said after the meeting, which included House and Senate Republican leaders.
House Majority Leader Rep. Steny Hoyer (D-Md.) told reporters after the chat, “We can’t pass legislation over his veto, and he can’t pass legislation that we don’t agree with.” In other words, there’s no progress to speak of.
Asked if the meeting changed anything, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) said flatly: “No.” For a change, I think Boehner actually got this one right.
What happens next? Who’s going to budge? That depends largely on who you ask.
Greg Sargent spoke to a source familiar with the details of the meeting and heard that Dems were firm with the president and showed no signs of backing down.
Reid told Bush that he understood that the White House would come after Congressional Dems after the veto of the bill with everything they had; Reid vowed to respond every bit as aggressively.
“Reid talked about a recent conversation he had with a retired general where they talked about the similarities between the current situation and Vietnam,” the source relates. “He talked about how the President and Secretary of Defense [during Vietnam] knew that the war was lost but continued to press on at the cost of thousands of additional lives lost.”
“The analogy to Vietnam appeared to touch a nerve with the President. He appeared a little sensitive to it,” the source continued. “And he clearly didn’t like to hear people in the room say that the war couldn’t be won militarily.”
The WaPo, meanwhile, suggests Dems on the verge of making major concessions.
Congressional Democratic leaders are moving to make their proposed timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq “advisory” as they seek to reconcile two versions of war spending legislation into a single bill that they plan to pass next week, according to several House members.
The compromise language would keep the deadlines included in the original House bill but make them nonbinding, as the Senate version did, and would allow President Bush to waive troop-readiness standards, lawmakers said. Bush has vowed to veto legislation with timetables in it, calling it a schedule of surrender, but Democrats hope to show that they are being flexible and the president rigid by softening the terms.
Whether the votes are there for something like this remains unclear. Pelosi struggled to keep liberals on board with a withdrawal timeline that would bring troops home over the next year (the Out of Iraq Caucus, with 80 members, wants an immediate withdrawal). If congressional leaders make too many concessions, the House may struggle to pass any kind of “compromise” at all.
This is going to get ugly.