As you’ve probably heard by now, House and Senate Dems agreed in conference yesterday to a $124 billion war-funding bill. Unlike the White House’s approach, congressional Dems were willing to make plenty of compromises.
Here’s the final plan: Dems fully fund the troops and their mission, while cutting back on some of the extraneous spending unrelated to the war. Dems set a target date for withdrawal by March 2008, but it’s not a binding deadline. However, the spending bill requires the White House to demonstrate by July that there’s significant progress in Iraq. If there’s no progress, withdrawal would begin immediately. If there is progress, a slower withdrawal would begin in October.
As for readiness, the Dems’ bill would restrict deployment of American forces that are not judged “fully mission capable” by military standards, would prohibit military tours in Iraq of more than one year. The president, however, could waive those requirements (though doing so would be politically damaging).
All of this, of course, is going to be rejected by the White House, which leads us to peek behind Door #2 — a short-term spending bill.
Several leading Dems have recommended that Congress, after Bush rejects funding for the troops during a war, give the president all the funding he wants, without strings, for two months. According to the White House, the urgency of passing a spending measure is great, so instead of another protracted fight, lawmakers would cave to the president’s demands — temporarily.
Under this scenario, Congress would then pick up the debate in 60 days. As the Dems see it, Republicans will be hesitant to vote against a “clean” bill in the short term, and in two months time, more Republicans will have grown tired of waiting for progress that isn’t coming. By then, they’ll be more inclined to support the Democratic policy embraced by the majority of Americans.
And what would the White House do with a spending bill that gives the president exactly what he wants for two months? According to an item in Roll Call, the Bush gang isn’t fond of that idea, either.
The Bush administration is warning Democrats not to pass a short-term war spending bill following an expected veto of a long-term war supplemental later this week, arguing that doing so would wreak havoc with the military’s ability to plan and prosecute the war.
Rob Portman, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, called the talk among House Democrats — but not their Senate counterparts — of a short-term bill “a major concern” that would tie the hands of Defense Department planners.
Portman noted that much of the spending in the president’s request would fund longer-term contracts for new equipment and repairs.
“They would have to make some very tough decisions because they can’t assume the full year funding is going to be there,” Portman said in an interview last week. “How can you depend on it?”
I see two problems with this. First, the political problem — the president is going to veto two spending bills that fully fund the troops in the middle of a war? Even one with no strings attached? Even for a failed and unpopular president, Bush would be pushing his luck.
Second, Portman’s complaint is wholly unpersuasive because it’s entirely inconsistent with his own office’s policy. The OMB is worried about consistent and reliable funding streams for the war? Here’s an idea: why not budget for them? As Paul Krugman explained:
Since the beginning, the administration has refused to put funding for the war in its regular budgets. Instead, it keeps saying, in effect: “Whoops! Whaddya know, we’re running out of money. Give us another $87 billion.”
At one level, this is like the behavior of an irresponsible adolescent who repeatedly runs through his allowance, each time calling his parents to tell them he’s broke and needs extra cash.
What I haven’t seen sufficiently emphasized, however, is the disdain this practice shows for the welfare of the troops, whom the administration puts in harm’s way without first ensuring that they’ll have the necessary resources.
As long as a G.O.P.-controlled Congress could be counted on to rubber-stamp the administration’s requests, you could say that this wasn’t a real problem, that the administration’s refusal to put Iraq funding in the regular budget was just part of its usual reliance on fiscal smoke and mirrors. But this time Mr. Bush decided to surge additional troops into Iraq after an election in which the public overwhelmingly rejected his war — and then dared Congress to deny him the necessary funds.
Stay tuned.