{"id":10747,"date":"2007-05-09T13:20:24","date_gmt":"2007-05-09T17:20:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/10747.html"},"modified":"2007-05-09T13:20:24","modified_gmt":"2007-05-09T17:20:24","slug":"would-bush-veto-funding-for-the-war-twice","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/would-bush-veto-funding-for-the-war-twice\/","title":{"rendered":"Would Bush veto funding for the war twice?"},"content":{"rendered":"

After the president vetoed the last congressionally-backed war-funding bill, there was widespread speculation about what Democratic lawmakers would try next. Yesterday, House Dems appeared to rally behind a new plan<\/a>, which would give Bush all the funding he wants, with no withdrawal timeline — in kind of a down-payment plan.<\/p>\n

A House Democratic proposal introduced yesterday that would give President Bush half of the money he has requested for the war effort, with a vote in July on whether to approve the rest, hinges on progress in meeting political benchmarks that Iraq has thus far found difficult to achieve.<\/p>\n

The House measure, which could come to a vote as early as tomorrow, would substantially raise the pressure on Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government to meet lagging commitments — including new laws on oil revenue and de-Baathification, constitutional revisions, provincial elections and the demobilization of militias — that Bush has said are crucial to the success of the U.S. military strategy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s the deal: Bush wants $95.5 billion right now to fund the wars. According to the House Dem plan, Bush would get $43 billion now, which would finance the war through July, and the rest would be contingent on the White House demonstrating some kind of progress in Iraq.<\/p>\n

House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) came up with the plan and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said it could be brought to the floor as early as tomorrow. Even some House Republicans thought the idea had merit<\/a> — Rep. Jim Gerlach (Pa.) said he saw an advantage in freeing up part of the money immediately while holding Iraqi feet to the fire. “Do we need to put things out in front of the Iraqi government that makes them realize they have to do certain things to continue the support of the American people? Absolutely,” Gerlach said.<\/p>\n

Yesterday, the White House didn’t sound fond of the idea. Tony Snow described the approach as “bad management<\/a>.” Today, the Bush gang went quite a bit further, vowing to veto<\/a> the spending measure.<\/p>\n

How many times is the president prepared to reject funding for the war? I would suggest he might pay a political price, but with a 28%<\/a> approval rating, I suspect he’s at rock bottom anyway.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After the president vetoed the last congressionally-backed war-funding bill, there was widespread speculation about what Democratic lawmakers would try next. Yesterday, House Dems appeared to rally behind a new plan, which would give Bush all the funding he wants, with no withdrawal timeline — in kind of a down-payment plan. A House Democratic proposal introduced […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[617],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-10747","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}