Yesterday, the Congressional Democrats gave up their previous insistence on writing troop-withdrawal deadlines into the legislation funding the Bush administration’s continued administration of the war in Iraq. Basically, the President has an override-proof veto. He’s already vetoed one version of the spending bill and had threatened to do the same if the bill came back with the withdrawal deadline/timeline still in it.
WaPo’s Shailagh Murray writes,
- in the end, Democrats said they did not have enough votes to override a presidential veto and could not delay troop funding.
The spending package, expected to total $120 billion when the final version is released today, would require Bush to surrender virtually none of his war authority…
Instead of sticking with troop-withdrawal dates, Democrats accepted a GOP plan to establish 18 political and legislative benchmarks for the Iraqi government, with periodic reports from Bush on its progress, starting in late July. If the Iraqis fall short, they could forfeit U.S. reconstruction aid.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was so disappointed with the outcome that she said she might vote against the Iraq portion of the package, which will be split into two parts when it comes before the House. “I’m not likely to vote for something that doesn’t have a timetable,” she said.
How should we look at this outcome? I am trying to do so in a way that puts front and center the interests of the Iraqi people, who have been so badly damaged by my government’s actions over the past four years.
Would it have been better if the antiwar folks in Congress had been able to attach a firm withdrawal deadline to the spending bill? Yes, I believe it would have. Even though the language they were seeking to attach was, I believe, language that only specified the date for the beginning of a withdrawal, rather than for its complete ending, it would still have sent a powerful message.
But now, the President and his Republican co-believers– many of whom have rapidly been growing disenchanted with the war– will really have to wholly “own” the way things go in the next few months in Iraq. The antiwar Democrats tried to work constructively with Bush. But since he refused to put in even the fairly cautious timeline language they wanted to put in, then the conduct of the war is now firmly back in his hands… And meanwhile, all of us antiwar people– of whatever political party– can work even harder to bring pressure to bear on the President– Bush, up until January 2009; or if necessary, after him the next one– to bring all the troops home in a speedy, orderly, and generous way.
And by the way, while we’re planning a strategy for this, let’s make sure that all of us give due weight to the need to involve the UN quite fully in all aspects of the diplomacy and modalities of the pullout. The US may well have been able to “get into” Iraq nearly completely on its own. But it seems to me pure folly to imagine that it can get out of Iraq in anything like an orderly and acceptable way unless it recognizes that the era of unilateral US action on the world stage– including in Iraq– is definitively over.
That need for a robust and constructive rapprochement between Washington and the UN is something that was missing from the Baker-Hamilton report. It has also been significantly missing until now from most of the congressional discussion on Iraq.
Now, with the President having once again asserted his strongly unilateralist tendencies, seems like a good time for the US public and our representatives in Congress to have this very necessary conversation about the relationship between our country and the rest of the world.
Helena, your congressmen are a “game players”, useless they wasting time, the smoke going around for killing the time of massacre of a nation that have nothing to do US and its citizens.
May be your congressmen looks for their shares from GWB WalkCake War, for five years Iraqi oil no one knows who got it and how much oil produced “unmetered oil Production).
Please read this report wills tells what Bremer Co. and other highly reconstructions expertises contractor did in Iraq.
But look to this your House Committee on Foreign Affairs Tom Lantos , Chairman what he said in the last last:
” if you give a man a fish he will eat for a day but if you teach him how to fish he will eat for the rest of his life.
Come on man we ended in neither Iraq nor the fish and neither men to teach simply you “Kill’em all” with your folks looted the FISH.
This remind me of Senator John McCain had said back in October. Iraq, he said, is “a huge pot of honey that’s attracting a lot of flies.”
The flies are ?
You sent expert in reconstructions, what is appear later they are a Looting Expertises!!
Read more in Tom report
Lantos Calls Iraq Reconstruction a Mess
Congress seeks missing billions in Iraq
Amnesty International launches Report 2007
http://www2.amnesty.org/
I take cordial issue with your comments, Helena, both as regards their factual assumptions and the conclusions you draw from them.
In point of fact, the Speaker of the House of Representatives can prevent ANY spending bill whatsoever from reaching the House floor for consideration if he or she so chooses. The previous Republican Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, for example, never allowed the presentation of ANY bill unless a majority of his own Republican caucus sufficed to pass it with no involvment WHATSOEVER by the “opposition” Democrats who seldom even knew the room numbers where their commitees supposedly met. So all this irrelevant palaver by Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi that she needs some kind of “veto-proof” majority in Congress to thwart Deputy Dubya Bush’s maniacal misadventure in Iraq simply won’t wash and it won’t wear — factually speaking.
Yes, the Republicans will accuse the Democrats of “losing” Deputy Dubya’s already lost war; but they have done nothing else but do precisely that ever since Deputy Dubya began losing it by beginning it over four years ago. What do the Democrats expect to change with further appeasement of the Republicans? Did Speaker Pelosi miss out on that whole Karl Rove strategy of bullying “liberal hawk” Democrats into supporting the Cheney-Bush cabal’s reckless stampede into needless war only to ridicule and demean them ever afterwards for doing so? How many Republicans pissing in their faces do Democrats require to wake up and smell the disdainful urine dripping off their own chins? More eloquently stated, as Charles Sanders Peirce noted back in the nineteenth century: “Where two faiths flourish side by side, renegades are looked upon with contempt even by the party whose beliefs they have adopted.” Just ask the Clinton Partners in Pathos how much love and respect they earned from Republicans for supinely doing practically everything the Republicans ever said they wanted to accomplish but couldn’t manage all by themselves.
I have opposed ANY supplemental spending bill for further military occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan FOR YEARS. I have FOR YEARS considered it a major mistake for ANY Congress to even CONSIDER extortionate presidential “emergency” military spending demands outside the normal two-year military appropriations process. I opposed the former Republican Congress for caving in to Democratic President Bill Clinton’s demands for funds to bomb Serbia (including the Chinese embassy in Belgrade) as well as Iraq (and any other country he wanted to attack) just as I have consistenly opposed both Republican and Democratic Congresses for submitting to similar and even worse extortionate demands from Sheriff Dick Cheney and Deputy Dubya Bush. I oppose the Imperial Presidency and/or its new wrinkle: the Vice Presidential Shogunate Regency; and it makes no difference to me the name, gender, or political party associated with the particular Imperial President (or hapless propaganda catapulter, “liberal hawk,” or whatever) du jour.
It did not require any election of Democrats to (nominal) majority status in Congress for me to adopt this position. Alexander Hamilton recommended it in the Federalist Papers back in 1789 (making no reference to the non-existent-at-that-time Democratic or Republican parties. While trying to sell the Constitution to reluctant colonial Americans who justly feared ANY president’s kingly ambitions — made predictable by human lust for ever greater power combined with the ready presence of a standing army as his/her potential Praetorian Guard — Hamiliton, Madison, and others argued that simply FAILING TO COME TO AGREEMENT about any authorized funding for such executive branch aggrandizement through abuse of the standing military would effectively terminate BOTH the abuse, AND the standing military, if necessary. No “veto-proof” majorities in Congress need exist when the Speaker of the House of Representatives simply refuses to allow any spending bill, whatsoever, “emergency” or otherwise, to come before the House of Representatives for consideration, let alone approval. The Senate and the President have nothing to say in the matter if the Speaker of the House determines that they need not have one. To repeat the essential point:
THE ENTIRE DEFENSE OF THE REPUBLIC AGAINST ABUSE OF THE STANDING MILITARY BY THE PRESIDENT RESTS NOT ON ANY “VETO-PROOF” MAJORITIES IN CONGRESS CONSIDERED AS A BICAMERAL WHOLE BUT ON THE SIMPLE RENDERING MOOT OF ANY FUNDING ISSUES THROUGH THE SIMPLE ABSENCE OF ANY FUNDING BILL ORIGINATING IN THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES — PERIOD.
Can I make myself any more clear on this subject?
So — not to put too fine a point on it — Speaker Nancy Pelosi has UTTERLY AND COMPLETELY FAILED to either understand or apply the supreme Constitutional antidote to imperial presidential abuse of our military: a power placed in her hands for just such a perilous national eventuality as we now face. The self-proclaimed “new sheriff in town” who bravely boasted that she wouldn’t issue “any more blank (rubber) checks” to the mendacious miscreants who have betrayed us all — both Iraqis and Americans — has proven herself unqualified to clean the spitoons in the town tavern, let alone handle the town’s law enforcement and/or banking transactions. What a monumental disappointment, if not simply just another brutal act of betrayal. Did this woman sleep through the entire reign of former Republican Speakers Gingrich and Hastert?
One other factual matter that needs highlighting here involves simple arithmetic. A Pelosi-Reid sanctioned 95.6 billion dollar war authorization bill for 4 months translates to 23.6 billion dollars per month — more than DOUBLE the recent 8-to-9 billion dollar per month tab that even the previous rubber-stamp, rubber-blank-check-authorizing Republican congress coughed up on demand. Either that, or this stupid, bloody blundering still costs, say, 9.5 billion per month as it has for the past several years, which would mean that Pelosi and Reid actually intend for their “four month” authorization to last for 10 months. Either way, they lie, they lie, and they just keep on lying, just to keep in practice. Either the war costs twice as much per month as our government lets on or our government plans for it to keep on costing the normal huge amount per month only for six more months than our government says it will continue. Lies, damned lies, and statistics. Figures may not lie, but liars often figure.
I’ve had it with these browbeaten Democratic Bozos. A veto works two ways. Offered money for the troops that he said he didn’t want with his veto, then the lack of any money for “the troops” rests with Depuby Dubya Bush and his veto, not with the Democratic Congress that foolishly — and needlessly — offered him any money at all. So, Pelosi and Reid should let Deputy Dubya live with — and try to eat — his veto. If he wants any more money for taking our troops hostage in oppostion to the will of the American people, then he knows where to come to sign for it. Really, Pelosi and Reid should just pull that “Godfather” routine and say that the first offer, if not taken, will only get a hideously worse one later: what the Godfather called “an offer you can’t refuse.” Now I suppose Dubya’s disdainful nickname of “Fredo” as applied to his own amnesiac Attorney General Gonzales applies to both Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid as well.
The Democratic Party just bought ownership of Deputy Dubya’s disintegrating debacle. Once they’ve caved in to blackmail for supporting 100,000 combat troops “in harm’s way,” they’ll have no choice but to cough up twice as much blackmail money now that Cheney and Bush have surreptitiously begun doubling the hostage combat troop numbers up to a reported 200,000 by years’ end — a date supposedly well past the September 30th end of Pelosi and Reid’s “four month” appropriation. I smell a rat — or a stinking dead Albatross — now proudly worn by the Democratic Party “leadership” in Congress.
Nancy Pelosi needs to go back to baby sitting her grandchildren. She simply hasn’t got what it takes to do the job of Speaker when America and Iraq both need a Speaker capable of wielding power for once and for good. Anyone care to add up the number of Americans and Iraqis who’ve died in just the seven months since Americans loudly said with their votes that they didn’t want any more of what Nancy Pelosi has just purchased for them on their children’s and grandchildren’s credit card? Some mother and grandmother!
It’s magnificent, that rant is, but it is not politics.
Even despite the reference to Col. Hamilton’s newspaper articles, it is not American politics.
By and large, power is still located where the 1787 Constitution (as subsequently amended) originally placed it. There isn’t any Power Elite that rules us all from an undisclosed location for nefarious ends of their own, although there is, to be sure, the narrow and extremist Republican Party. (As Mr. Murry notes, Col. Hamilton never heard of that crew, although by the usual accounts he was one of its godfathers.) In any case, the development and stabilization of the elephant and donkey show has made some comparatively small changes in how our real system works, minor discrepancies between the architect’s drawing and the present state of the building. The quarrel in the House about the Iraq aggression seems to involve one of them. It may (or may not) have been true in 1789 that “the Speaker of the House of Representatives can prevent ANY spending bill whatsoever from reaching the House floor for consideration if he or she so chooses,” but in 2007 this is certainly not the case. If Ms. Pelosi of California tried to behave like that, she would become EX-Speaker in a flash: the Congressional donkeys would take away her plum job, and that would be that. Mr. Hastert of Illinois was not in the same position at all, he had the support of a monolithic phalanx of lemmings. (Remember Will Rogers? “I don’t belong to any organized political party. I’m a Democrat.” Sometimes it seems that the black hats have everything going their way . . . .)
In 1789 the Speaker was Mr. Muhlenberg of Pennsylvania — bet you didn’t know that! — and he would probably have had a better chance than Ms. Pelosi, perhaps there would have been so many factionettes that he could have imposed himself in a matter of comparable importance between knowing clearly what he wanted and being deferred to because of his office by those who were not so clear-minded. Even in Col. Hamilton’s America, though, this absolute power of the purse belonged to the House as a whole, which is to say, to whatever majority in it could actually be mustered. Discovering two hundred years on that we’ve had a sort of negative fiscal dictatorship all this time that nobody ever noticed, let alone put into action, is pretty far around the bend, I’m afraid, it is rather like the nonsense current in certain rightist covens according to which Amendment XIV is not really the law of the land because it was never properly ratified by the required number of separate states. Everybody in America has an informal right to reinvent the Federal Constitution in order to achieve her immediate purposes, I don’t propose to infringe anything so basic as that, but let’s face it, unless a lot of other people go along with the reinvention, nothing much will come of it.
As a Democrat, I find this particular reinvention a bit contrary to my party’s principles, what there are of them. If Ms. Pelosi could really act as suggested she’d be as unilateral and preëmptive as the clown in the Oval Office has been. If she even merely wanted to be able to act like that, I’d rather somebody else had her job. Any donkey who aspires to hastertize and bushivate and mccarthify belongs over on Mr. Hastert’s side of the aisle, say I. Let him go be Lord of the Lemmings over there and leave the decent political grown-ups of America’s Party to squabble in peace!
Such criticism might encourage Mr. Murry to direct his fire at my party in general, and not just Madame Speaker. But he’s already there ahead of me, sort of: “The Democratic Party just bought ownership of Deputy Dubya’s disintegrating debacle.” He’s also completely at odds with Dr. Cobban when he says that, for she maintains that “The antiwar Democrats tried to work constructively with Bush. But since he refused to put in even the fairly cautious timeline language they wanted to put in, then the conduct of the war is now firmly back in his hands.”
Her wiser estimate is not quite mine — the conduct of the war, and primary responsibility for the fiascos thereof, was never in anybody else’s hands for an instant, and couldn’t have been placed there constitutionally. But it is true enough that the Boy-‘n’-Party folks have now given up pretending to want any more advice and consent than can be extorted from them even with the present Supreme Court. I never thought there was anything more than insincere pretendin’ on the Crawfordites’ part, but one can never be 100% sure about the elephant people, so it’s a bit of relief to find that they remain firmly committed to hoggin’ all the Success and Victory in neo-Iraq for themselves. The PC team (Petraeus & Crocker, don’t you know?) had better rustle up some telegenic successes and victories for Boy and Party pronto, though, or else there may be not much hope of “President Giuliani” or “President McCain,” and in that case responsible nonwithdrawal itself may fall by the wayside. “President Clinton” might not be entirely responsible, nonwithdrawalwise.
I don’t recall either of them crudely mentioning an affiliation, but it looks as if Dr. Cobban is some sort of Democrat and Mr. Murry, something else. (Are there any Naderites left?) It’s nice from that standpoint that I agree with her that the militant Republicans have relieved us donkeys from any need to touch their tar baby and be defiled. What he, on the other hand, can be thinking of when he says the opposite is a bit difficult to work out. Even if Ms. Pelosi had possessed and utilized the almost Old Polish liberum veto that he attributes to her, that would hardly suffice to hang half the albatross around our party’s neck. It would be desirable that people not get so carried away in political discussion that they attempt to make the primary locus of responsibility for botches and calamities like the GOP’s Kiddie Krusade be whoever they happen to be most angry at most recently rather than the most perpish of the perps, calmly and objectively detected. Mr. Murry would probably not seriously deny my maxim that “They also serve who only pull the trigger,” but if one generalized from this single item, one would have to account him a trigger denier.
It would be OK, of course, it would even be admirable! to criticize us donkeys first — and to criticize us Americans first, in many similar and related instances — because we are presumably in charge of our own actions, but far less able to do anything effective about other people’s actions. Yet that canon of judgment applies only if the critic is a Democrat himself, which Mr. Murry perhaps is not. To stand outside both parties and maintain with a straight face that the extremists’ George XLIII and our Ms. Nancy are equally to blame for “the number of Americans and Iraqis who’ve died in just the seven months since Americans loudly said with their votes that they didn’t want any more” will not do at all.
Exactly how loudly Americans said that is a different question, but also pertinent. Our technical “control” of the Senate hinges on Mr. Lieberman of Connecticut, after all, and that honourable gentleman is not exactly marching to the same drummer as most Democrats when it comes to aggressions and conquests and occupations and so on and so forth. I have to wish that the electorate had spoken up somewhat louder than it did. Still, Mr. Murry is right about what voters said as opposed to the volume level. Everybody may safely dismiss the self-servicin’ theory cherished at ideological watering holes like The Weekly Standard that the electorate really just yearns for a better sort of invasion and conquest and occupation, in short, a new improved Preëmptive Retaliation™ product — which very product, as it fortunately happens, the PC twosome are now workin’ night and day at New Baghdad with really fearsome braininess to furnish! Rear-Colonel Freddy Kagan may amuse himself by thinkin’ so, but more competent political observers understand that at this point in the bushogenic quagmire America basically just wants out. (Fifty-odd percent of Americans, that means, of course, “only” a majority of us. Almost certainly not the two-thirds supermajority of us that would lawfully override a Big Management veto, were we all Senators and Representatives.)
How about that stinking dead rat or albatross that Mr. Murry smells? He may be on to something, but it is probably not quite what he thinks it is. It has now been officially scheduled, almost, that the Boy-‘n’-Party Surge of ’07™ will turn to crunch sometime between Labor Day and Columbus Day — or why not generously and appropriately give Dr. Petraeus and Mr. Crocker until Halloween? Only at that point will the forces that insist upon responsible nonwithdrawal be required to reveal their full strength and bring it to bear directly upon Senator Reid and Speaker Pelosi, indirectly upon Televisionland and us misguided voters. Being a bit of a pessimist, I expect that the donkey leadership will probably “cave” and give the ISG/CFR gentry, our august and revered bipartisan foreign policy community, what it wants (i.e., responsible nonwithdrawal), denying the ignorant and reckless mob what we want (“Just get out!”). However I don’t think Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi know in May they they are going to cave in October, and I most assuredly don’t believe that they have already secretly resolved to cave, or have decided that caving is the right thing to do. Always remember “A week is a long time in politics”! In this instance we are speaking of twenty weeks, and for the practical pol so vast an interval makes the ultimate or penultimate crunch about Crawford’s occupation policy seem almost as far off as the Last Judgment. The rat (or albatross, or Schrödinger’s cat) may be doomed, but technically speaking it is not dead yet.
Whether “Cheney and Bush have” really “surreptitiously begun doubling the hostage combat troop numbers up to a reported 200,000 by year’s end” is a different question from whether Mr. Reid and Ms. Pelosi are in on the scam, which I am sure they are not. For that matter, it is one thing for Big Management to suddenly notice next October that its military hired hands can be used as hostages to extort responsible nonwithdrawal from the reluctant majority of that damned board of directors they’ve been saddled with, and quite another thing for BM to be preparin’ such a ploy months in advance.
Like most conspiracy theories, that one makes the bad guys out brighter than they are. I don’t think the bozos in question even expect at this point to have to give up on Success and Victory exclusively for Boy and Party and be forced to settle for some wimpy bipartisan half measure of “responsible nonwithdrawal” instead, let alone think that they can be secretly engaged in makin’ plans for such a regrettable contingency at the moment. They’re bozos, these guys! They really and truly expect Dr. Petraeus and Mr. Crocker to win the lottery for them. Or if not that, then Father Zeus and Mr. Micawber will send ’em somethin’ else for Halloween just as good. THAT is how the militant Republican stumblebums have behaved ever since Day One of their aggression in Mesopotamia, and if there is any reason to think that they’ve suddenly changed their spots lately, somebody else will have to point it out to me.
Happy days.
Helena:
I cannot share your faith in the UN.
This institution is nothing more than an instrument in the hands of the big powers to work their will on weaker nations
This is the same UN that approved the murderous sanctions that killed hundreds of thousand of Iraqis during the Clinton regime.
In fact the current UN has sunk even lower than the old League of Nations. The League collapsed after it failed to effectively oppose aggression by Japan and Italy during the 1930s. But the League never actively connived at and supported aggression and genocidal sanctions as the current UN has done.
The faster the UN goes into the dustbin of history the better off the world will be IMHO.
Crimson, I think I can understand your great bitterness, reproach, and anger toward the UN. Yes, in many ways it IS only an instrument used by the “great” powers to impose their will on the weaker powers; and the role it played in maintaining the extremely lethal sanctions regime in Iraq was indeed terrible.
However, the UN also embodies some very important norms and ideals that I think the world needs more than ever today, including the norm of human equality and the norm of nonviolent resolution of international differences. True, it has never come close to living up those norms/ideals. But the alternative of NOT having any inter-national organization that at least proclaims such norms (regardless whether it always lives up to them) would imho be far, far worse. Then the world truly would be ‘ruled’ only by the law of ‘might makes right’.
I guess the challenge is to work both to have the UN more effectively embody and live by the good norms and to curb US unilateralism and global-scale arrogance… As a US citizen I see myself having more responsibility for the latter task, though not neglecting the former.
Getting back to the war funding issue for a minute, I still believe that the only to get us out is to make the profiteers actually pay for the war by attaching a tax measure to the funding bill. Dollar for dollar, tax the wealthy who are making so much money on this war and make them actually pay for it , and watch how fast Bush and his wealthy friends lose interest in protecting Iraquis. And the spineless Dems do have the power to do this and the public wouold support it.
Helena
I cannot forget that during the sanctions regime that killed so many a lot of folks who ordinarily would have opposed them signed on after they were declared “kosher” by the UN.
The UN , in effect, provided propaganda cover for the brutal undeclared war against Iraq during the 1990s that prepared the way for the Bush invasion.
and the UN is doing it again with sanctions on Iran – which so far, have not killed anyone, but just wait…..
Concerning Crimson’s comment,
I’m with Helena on this. The UN is a group of countries. It can only reflect the actual relation of power existing between these countries. So we shouldn’t expect miracles from the UN.
Nevertheless, it is important to have an international organization supporting the fundamental principles acknowledged by the UN.
After each crisis the international community tries to reform itself. Lessons have to be drawn from the Iraq crisis. The main question is how can all the other countries prevent that a big power, like the US sudenly invade another because it suits its interests ?
Indeed, since the US has the most powerfull army, it is quasi impossible to resist to it. In fine, the responsibility rested with the citizen of the US : why did they allow such a thing ? and why did they bring Bush to power a second time ?
Concerning the Iraq sanctions : France and some other EU countries have been calling several times to halt the sanctions; and their action has resulted in mildered sanctions (aka the oil for food program). Of course, it would have been better if the sanctions had been stopped.
Concerning Iran, it may well be different now, Sarkozy has recently declared that the UNSC had to be tough on Iran. But the situation is nomore what it was ten years ago : China and India would probably be happy to buy Iran oil, if western capitalists don’t want it.
But in the end, multilateralism is the only solution for a peacefull world. I hope that after the US get out of the Iraq quagmire it will have learned the value of multilateralism.
The UN structures have to be reformed in order to take newer countries in account, like India, Brasil etc.. this may change the power-relationships. May be this can be done through the creation of a new organization ? If the older proves to difficult to reform. But it may not be easier to create a new organization that to reform the UN.
At risk of stating the obvious samctions do kill by driving societies in upon themselves, raising internal tensions, legitimising security crackdowns and so on. When sanctions are accompanied by covert operations, aka terrorists, and massive propaganda campaigns of the colour coded revolution type (which is the way things are being done in Iran)the first casualties often have the appearance of being self inflicted. There is no clear answer but how many of the millions who died in the Soviet Union under Stalin or in Mao’s China were really victims of campaigns of sanctions and encirclement? As the reaction to 9/11 has shown it takes a relatively small event to drive a society crazy.
As to the UN: the idea of human solidarity and international co-operation is no longer sustained but is actually discredited by the institution’s slavish kow-towing to Washington. John Bolton has earned a footnote in history for his role in banging the lid on to that coffin. The necessity of securing international co-operation has never been greater, it may be that the United States will make its contribution by driving the rest of the world into a defensive alliance based upon core values of justice, human rights and environmental stewardship to which Washington has ceased to pay even lip service.
The Democratic leadership does not want to end the war in Iraq, for more or less the same reason the Republican leadership does not want to end the practice of abortion. Do you think dentists want to end tooth decay?
If I have the time, I will happily address some of the sophistry contained in JHM’s slippery rejoinders (like ad hominem non-sequiturs aimed at Ralph Nader, belittling references to “colonel” Hamilton, et cetera) to my “rant” about the powers exercised by the majority-party-elected Speaker of the House of Representatives. As George Orwell said, anyone familiar with British public school debating gambits knows all the tawdry tricks “off backwards” and can usually dispense with them easily. Again, I’ll bother with them individually as time permits. But first to the essential politics of the point at issue.
As I will repeat: the Congress of the United States exists on the basis of enumerated powers spelled out in Article I of the Constitution. By design, pre-eminent power rests with the Legislative Branch and not — as many erstwhile Republicans and Democrats suppose — in some mythical “unitary executive,” a monarchial abomination the very antithesis of everything our founders expected us, their posterity, to demand of our government. I admit that sometimes — as today — we hapless twits would have mystified and bewildered our ancestors by our lack of appreciation for the powers over our own destiny that they bequeathed to us. Yet as profound political realists, they really only expected the worst in human nature; and as we have regularly lived down to their lowest suspicions, so their design for a government by devils and not angels (Madison’s famous analogy) should still function as designed — with even a few improvements from time to time.
Those “factions” that Madison inveighed against have indeed materialized; yet Madison said that since we could not prevent them except by extinguishing freedom; so he advised multiplying them (i.e., more Ralph Naders, not fewer) and spreading them out over a vast expanse of political territory in order that they might mitigate each other’s influence and like Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” accrue in total affect the greater good. Raw power, of course, seeks just the opposite: namely, to consolidate into one highly “visible hand” (or “raised fist,” as H. G. Wells would say of those with no ideas) to eliminate competition and establish single-source monopoly, both political and economic. Nominal “Democrats” Pelosi and Reid have merely signified a willing adoption of their junior status in America’s monolithic faction: the crypto-fascist National Insecurity State. Expecting more of them does seem hopelessly naive, I concede, but the existing Constitution and time-developed rules of procedure in both Congressional bodies do all in fact allow them to behave otherwise, even decisively. Congressional “leaders” can in fact “lead.” Our present ones have instead chosen empty bluff followed by expedient collaboration with cupidity. They rather childishly seem to have thought that they could play at bearding the lame-duck vampire king (at 28% approval, nationwide, and dropping) without really driving the wooden stake of fiscal discipline through his deadbeat undead heart.
As America’s first and greatest Secretary of the Treasury — quite a step up from his rank of “colonel” (in fact Washington’s indispensable right-hand man during our Colonial War of Independence) — Alexander Hamiliton (who eventually rose to the rank of General) of course understood the necessary role of logistics, both monetary and material, in the sustenance of any government and its national standing army. He also understood the dangers to any form of Republican government inherent in such a standing army. As a consequence of both his fears and hopes, he argued long and successfully for the adoption of a Constitution that placed ultimate control over always-lurking militarism in the House of Representatives, as enumerated in Artile I. Thus, no expenditure for ANY military purpose may exceed TWO YEARS. Nothing about that Constitutional prohibition against “blank checks” for executive militarism has changed in two hundred years. And until such time as the American people amend their Constitution to say otherwise (and they haven’t), that explicit, enumerated power of the purse remains the supreme law of our land and no “implied” “other” powers, however vividly imagined, supercede it. Dick Cheny and Alberto Gonzales, naturally, will argue to the contrary. Pick your own advocate: Hamilton and Madison or those two discredited “unitary executive” jerks.
Now — to deflate just one piece of irrelevant sophistry — it does not follow that the Speaker of the House has no power of scheduling legislation simply because prior Republican speakers exercised it while a Democratic speaker has chosen not to. In two of Hamilton’s and Madison’s favorite phrases: those in Constitutional office “are not at liberty” to divest themselves of their Constitutional powers, “even if they should be so injudicious as to do so.” Once elected Speaker by her party’s majority caucus — with patronage powers and other agreed-upon enforcement mechanisms, Speaker Nancy Pelosi has all the authority she needs to keep an unwise “war” spending bill from House consideration. Her party and the American people elected her to do exactly that. She has more than enough fervently anti-war support in her party and the country at large to sustain her in this course of action. Practically speaking, she would lose a few marginal Republican-Lite types initially, but they would come crawling back in chagrin once Nancy Pelosi emerged as a heroic national figure instead of the pathetic joke she has in fact become. She had her choices and she made them badly. In any event, she may have just cost herself her own caucus and only gained a few fair-weather Republicans (“Sunshine Soldiers and Summer Patriots,” as Tom Paine called their ilk) for the moment who despise her now even more for her vain threats than they ever did previously for only her alleged “liberalism.” Some bargain. Some “negotiator.” Personally, I wouldn’t let her go shopping for my socks and underwear. She’d only pay far too much, charge it to my kids’ future income earnings, and come back with some purple Republican band-aids with which to mock Senator John Kerry’s war wounds at Republican coronations.
In summary, then, I will repeat that a failure to exercise enumerated Constituational powers does not render them non-existent. No elected or appointed official of our government “has the liberty” of assuming differently. And once more for those who simply cannot read for “sense” (let alone what I. A. Richards called “feeling,” “tone,” and “intention”), a FAILURE TO AGREE ON ANYTHING AT ALL (the desired and necessary outcome in this case) does NOT translate in any way to a requirement for A VETO PROOF MAJORITY, rarely achievable in any case. So let a hundred of Mao’s and Madison’s factions bloom and all vote against carefully crafted red-herring bills designed purposely to achieve that non-result: NO AGREEMENT TO SPEND, which means NO MORE WAR ON IRAQ THAT AMERICANS DON’T WANT AMERICA WAGING. Far easier to achieve the nothing we want than the “something else” we don’t. Again for example, the Republicans in the last Congress regularly brought all sorts of frivolous bills to the House floor for no other purpose than to see NO ONE agree with their ridiculous and politically poisoned premises. Speaker Nancy Pelosi can and should do precisely the same thing with a plethora of bills to “authorize” (in QBVII language) “a single penny” to fund Deputy Dubya’s Dubious Debacle in the desert: in other words, Nancy Pelosi can and should offer our mediocre Mayberry Machiavelli “the lowest coin in the realm” for his war-crime of lies and malfeasance, and do so repeatedly, claiming after each offer less than the one before that she gave Deputy Dubya not what he said he wanted, but what he needed and deserved: namely, nothing much.
I don’t know what irritates me more about my fellow Americans (especially “Democrats”) in govenment today: their craven subservience to imperial and upper-class “prerogatives” or their complete lack of any imagination and style in creatively employing the great gifts of freedom that our far-wiser ancestors thought we might have the good sense to want. Gore Vidal did surely have it right when he called Americans “among the most easily frightened people on earth.” That ugly and humiliating truth certainly applies to Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid. And the lame-duck vampire dauphin and his sneering gargoyle regent both know it.
People sure have gotten long-winded around here.
When global affairs reach an appaling tipping point folks react differently. Wordier folk foam, efficient writers seemingly go quiet. You have been on the quiet side of late JC, which is a pity.
Keith Olbermann:
” * The Democratic leadership has, in sum, claimed a compromise with the Administration, in which the only things truly compromised, are the trust of the voters, the ethics of the Democrats, and the lives of our brave, and doomed, friends, and family, in Iraq.
You, the men and women elected with the simplest of directions – Stop The War – have traded your strength, your bargaining position, and the uniform support of those who elected you… for a handful of magic beans.”
I can’t believe the capitulation of the Democrats. I guess it was predictable, but I’m still really disappointed. In my own delusional fever, I wanted to believe they would take a real stand and stick it to Dubya and his War. But alas no. I don’t know what mixture of political cowardice and beholden-ness to the same war-mongering military-industrial forces that control the Repubs was at play here. But golly, what a sad day. There’s a gulf between Congressional Democrats and the left-leaning party base that will significantly increase because of this. The dis-connect and alienation are palpable. Do what we elected you last year to do, already.
It’s understandable these Democrat Congresswomen and men are confident that voters will eventually calm down and move on from this outbreak of Iraq hysteria sometime during their years of incumbency.
They are responsible, professional politicians, who patrioticly respect American institutions and economic interests. They listen carefully to their specialist advisors to establish the best way forward for the nation. They are certainly not peacenik hippie idealogues, waiting for any possible nod from Joe Public to suddenly try and go all tibetan in the ME. That’s just a pipedream.
They sensibly harnessed the prevailing sentiment, (in this case an antiwar one) to get voted in. As one does. They did this so over the coming important years the nation could benefit from their superior professional skills in the continuation and expansion of American policy. I mean its not like they said the Iraq war was great or anything.
Now those billions approved for different reasons, these billions will let GWB continue his war.
The question here is what US need to do that not can happen again either for GWB or any US president in the future mieght be he doing same as this president?
So the reality we need to stop blaming GWB and look seriously to the political system that make GWB get what he ask for, despite both houses in the hands of democrats, with Bush popularity was very low in US.
This is the issue that should be take our attentions and how this democratic system should be fine tuning to be back to the line of democracy from the people to the people.
Salah,
You have writen a great comment, I fully agree with it. What an irony that now Iraqi have to give Americans a lesson of democracy.
I’m all for putting thumb in George W. Bush’s eye over this war, but I think a case can be made that the Dems acted reasonably well.
They abandoned a bill that would have been vetoed without, it seems, any political cost to the President (what was the cost of his last veto?).
At the same time, they pushed through domestic funding Bush would otherwise never have accepted.
And, as ugly as this is, if they bring it up again in the fall, the horror of the coming summer will have brought the political cost of a veto to a far greater level.
I think we’re going to see American casualties soar this summer as the military takes a more aggressive stance. So, by the fall, public opposition will be in full throat. A veto might well be overridden then.
This is a harsh calculation, but I think it’s on Bush’s head, not the democratic Congress’s.
What Bush did and would do was a given. What some people in candyland chose to forget, was that so was and is the anti-war resolve of the democratic controlled congress and senate. When did they know their next move, exactly? Congress is now frankly just a pantomine show, where the kids are calling out “behind you, look behind you” to a “hero” that just cannot find the bad guy.
It isn’t a matter of telling the voters “we didn’t start the fire” you elected us to put out. But then the underlying thesis really is, folks can only vote for us or the republicans, and not for a while.
Here we are witnessing the same old contortions of sophistry married to the same old apparent witlessness about basic responsible leadership. Most people are quite able to smell a rat that has been dead this long. Yes Iraq will be quite bad in coming months. It’s bad enough now, and it was bad enough 4 years ago.
Napoleon Bonaparte once said about the direct course straight to one’s objective: “If you want to take Vienna, you take Vienna.” Or to quote Charles Sanders Peirce: “It makes no sense going to Constantinople by first heading up to the North Pole so that one can then come down upon a meridian.” Likewise, if one wants to end a war of unconscionable lies and unimitigated malice, then one ends it. Mouthing inane platitudes about “the beginning of the beginning of the end” only perpetuates the practice of finding another “new beginning” once it becomes abundantly clear that those who say they seek an “end” will settle for just more empty adjectives placed in front of the word “beginning.” This sort of thing reminds one of the old joke where one man pronounces himself an “anti-communist” only to have his interlocutor exclaim: “I don’t care what kind of communist you are.” That sort of thing. America likewise doesn’t care what kind of “sovereign” nation it disastrously occupies to no purpose but stalling for ever more time until those Americans responsible have safely absconded unpunished.
As I believe I’ve noted previously — and this bears incessant repetition — George Orwell had a truly apt phrase for our current Iraq-Nam quagmire: “Catastrophic Gradualism.” In one of his memorable figures of speech from an essay of the same name he explained: “The formula usually employed is ‘You can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.’ And if one replies, ‘Yes, but where is the omelet?’ the answer is likely to be: ‘Oh, well, you can’t expect everything to happen all in a moment.'” After four-years-going-on-six in Iraq (longer in Afghaninstan), we still hear the architects and apologists for America’s greatest self-inflicted disaster (the British have had worse) offer us more promises of the (uncounted) eggs they plan to go on breaking without even bothering to mention the long-forgotten omelet. Breaking “eggs” (meaning Iraqi, Afghan, American and hopefully not too many more British lives) has predictably become an end in itself. Endless “Career War” as “Ordnance Expenditure Expedition.” Or, as we used to say in Vietnam long ago: “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.” Catastrophic Gradualism.
I’ve lived, served, and suffered through far too many past years during which I had to endure the same mindless drivel as we hear today — sometimes even couched in the same old discredited dogma — seeking to justify and perpetuate another ridiculous slaughter of the innocents to further the tawdry careers of men and women who can only lower our expectations of them the more they fail and disappoint. I don’t buy any of this Catastrophic Gradualism bullshit for a moment; and so I feel tempted to just dismiss the recycled rationalizations and empty promises out-of-hand as John Maynard Keynes would do whenever he received unsolicited doctoral dissertations to read and comment upon. Said he: “I will lose no time giving this matter all the attention it deserves.” The day I hear Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, and other ostensible “opponents” of Deputy Dubya’s Debacle say the same thing when asked by him for more of our blood and money to fund his fraudulent farce, then and only then will I give them any more consideration than both they and he have shown they deserve: namely, none.
If we settle for more broken eggs instead of the promised omelet, we will only keep eating broken eggs and wondering about those mysterious automatic electronic deductions that keep draining our bank accounts (and children’s trust fund) for “meals” none of us ever received at restaurants that don’t exist. Thanks a lot, Nancy, Harry, Dick, and Dubya. You sure did work that bait-and-switch (or bad-cop/worse-cop) scam on us yet again. But who can really blame these con artists? When they know we’ll eat bullshit and ask for second (third, etc.) helpings (while they dine with David Broder on quail at Karl Rove’s table), why should anyone expect them to begin feeding us anything else? The crap costs them nothing and us everything. These cynical charlatans have lowered no expectations for themsleves further down than those they have of ever witnessing our reputed (but seldom demonstrated) “intelligence” and “common sense.” When crime pays this handsomely, criminals proliferate. Demand and Supply. That sort of thing.
Inspired and eloquent Michael — I didn’t follow JHM’s “energetic” reply. Let me guess, you’re using Dragon software…. :-} In any case, I used to not buy into the power elite theories either — til I “discovered” AIPAC….
Michael, you remind me of Jefferson’s quote to Madison about the new constitution having checked “the dog of war” …. if only.
Yet as it’s been a few decades since last reading the FP, can you help me out on which Federal Paper essay you are referencing, esp. re. Hamilton?
My question stems from a curio of mine re. the often alleged intense rivalry and suspicions betwixt Jefferson & Hamilton. If they were so bad, how come Jefferson had a bust of Hamilton prominently displayed in his grand entrace at Monticello? (Perhaps out of respect to the broad principles they did share, apart from their famous policy differences over the bank, international law, France, executive powers, etc.)
BTW, John C gets kudos for two quotes of the day on this thread…. re. the length of the disquisitions here, and the one about the Dentists, Democrats, & Dubya’s — and, we could add, batteries, high mileage vehicles, and drugs. As Trudeau waxes all the way to his bank, why would the drug companies want us to be well?
Guys
Just for Michael Murray, Here is his his Tonkin Gulf incident.(courtesy of Juan Cole)
http://www.thewashingtonnote.com/archives/002145.php
Exactly who is running the show in Washington DC these days?
“Congress lets Bush run his own war”
An alternative view from Anne Wright in the “Truthout” editorial
What Congress Really Approved: Benchmark No. 1: Privatizing Iraq’s Oil for US Companies
With the Bush administration’s “Support the Troops” bill and its benchmarks, primarily Benchmark No. 1, we finally have the reason for the US invasion of Iraq: to get easily accessible, cheap, high-grade Iraq oil for US corporations.
Personally I don’t think most wars have a single contributing factor; but sure, you wouldn’t mind their oil.
Roland – getting control of the oil was the only reason for the war that ever made any sense at all. And it is the only goal that has not been abandoned along the way. Unless you count killing the guy that threatened Poppy.
Well yes you are right John, Oil was the only sensible reason and the sequence of ad hoc/ post hoc justifications all look a bit sick now.
But the great empires are frightening organisms ; their main Casus belli often makes cold monetery sense but they also cultivate plans and intrigues to feed their own hubris and provide intrigue for their many courtiers.
Like Mr Cheney and all those big boats in the gulf ATM. And then you have the reasons they and their apologists give publicly layered over all that.
The reasons; often just fairytale stories, that don’t make sense.