{"id":9794,"date":"2007-02-01T09:00:17","date_gmt":"2007-02-01T14:00:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thecarpetbaggerreport.com\/archives\/9794.html"},"modified":"2007-02-01T09:00:17","modified_gmt":"2007-02-01T14:00:17","slug":"senators-strike-deal-craft-bi-partisan-resolution-on-iraq","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/senators-strike-deal-craft-bi-partisan-resolution-on-iraq\/","title":{"rendered":"Senators strike deal, craft bi-partisan resolution on Iraq"},"content":{"rendered":"

For all the recent speculation and anguish over a non-binding Senate resolution against the president’s latest Iraq policy, it looked likely that nothing would pass. The Biden-Hagel-Levin measure had Democratic support, but most Republicans were hesitant, and a threatened veto was likely to work. A weaker Warner-Collins-Nelson resolution was seen as being overly tepid by Dems, but garnered slightly more GOP backing.<\/p>\n

As recently as last week, an effort to merge the two proposals failed, and a Senate divided over competing non-binding resolutions appeared unlikely to pass anything. For the White House and its allies, this was the ideal scenario — they admitted<\/a> that they “hoped to divide Senate opinion largely along party lines, to allow Bush to argue that any outright statement opposing his plan was politically motivated partisanship.”<\/p>\n

With this in mind, yesterday’s breakthrough<\/a> was a sign of real progress.<\/p>\n

Democratic and Republican opponents of President Bush’s troop-buildup plan joined forces last night behind the nonbinding resolution with the broadest bipartisan backing: a Republican measure from Sen. John W. Warner of Virginia.<\/p>\n

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced the shift, hoping to unite a large majority of the Senate and thwart efforts by the White House and GOP leaders to derail any congressional resolution of disapproval of Bush’s decision to increase U.S. troop levels in Iraq by 21,500.<\/p>\n

Although the original Democratic language was popular within the party, it had little appeal among Republicans. Warner’s proposal drew support from both sides, and it was retooled last night to maximize both Democratic and Republican votes.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The bad news is, the new resolution isn’t nearly as strong as the Biden-Hagel-Levin measure. The good news is, this new one will probably pass.
\n
\nThe original resolution with Dem backing included language that the Bush plan is “against the national interest.” That language is now gone. Warner’s original resolution, however, included language that some additional troops could be worthwhile. That’s gone, too. To help appeal to more GOP senators, the compromise version vows not to cut off funding for the war.<\/p>\n

That last provision, of course, is not exactly what a lot of Dems wanted to see, but it seems to be a fait accompli — Russ Feingold and a couple of others want to put war funding on the table, but Dems seem all-too-aware of the fact that they don’t have the votes.<\/p>\n

I haven’t seen the specific language of the new compromise resolution, so I’m hesitant to praise or criticize it. At a certain level, the specifics have limited relevance — as Kevin Drum recently noted<\/a>, “A nonbinding resolution is a purely political document that has no effect on actual policy, so the only test of the language is what effect it has on public opinion.”<\/p>\n

Quite right. What’s the effect here? We’ll see, but if a resolution gets 70 votes in the Senate saying the president is off track and that escalation is a mistake, it’s bound to get some attention.<\/p>\n

Of course, it also leads to an inevitable question: what does the Senate do after<\/i> the non-binding resolution?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For all the recent speculation and anguish over a non-binding Senate resolution against the president’s latest Iraq policy, it looked likely that nothing would pass. The Biden-Hagel-Levin measure had Democratic support, but most Republicans were hesitant, and a threatened veto was likely to work. A weaker Warner-Collins-Nelson resolution was seen as being overly tepid by […]<\/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-9794","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9794","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=9794"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9794\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9794"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9794"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/stevebenen.com\/thecarpetbaggerreport\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9794"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}