Lee, Woolsey, Waters, Watson Back Pelosi Bill
Progressive opposition to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s plan to give President Bush the money he seeks to maintain the war in Iraq for at least another year — but to attach benchmarks and a timeline designed to make it easier to ultimately end the war — went into collapse Thursday.
Four key members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, who had been among the more outspoken critics of the Pelosi plan, agreed to back after meetings with the speaker.
“After two grueling weeks of meetings, progressive members of Congress brought forth an agreement that provided the momentum to pass a supplemental spending bill that, for the first time, establishes a timeline for the withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq,” California Democrats Barbara Lee, Lynn Woolsey, Maxine Waters and Diane Watson said in a statement released late in the day.
Lee and Woolsey co-chair the Congressional Progressive Caucus.
Waters is a founder of the bipartisan Out of Iraq Caucus.
All four had objected that the Pelosi bill asked too little of the president and allowed the war to go on for too long.
But, as it became clear that their opposition might prevent passage of the spending bill and hand a preceived victory to the president, the progressives bagan to waver.
Waters said that she and her allies would no longer encourage anti-war Democrats to oppose the Pelosi plan. “We have released people who were beginning…to be pulled in a different direction,” she was reported as explaining. “We don’t want them to be put in a position where they look like they are undermining Nancy’s speakership.”
For Lee, the decision to back Pelosi’s plan was particularly tough. She cast the sole vote against authorizing Bush to mount a military response to the 9-11 attacks in 2001, and she has consistently opposed every step to initiate and expand the Iraq War. “I have struggled with this decision, but I finally decided that, while I cannot betray my conscience, I cannot stand in the way of passing a measure that puts a concrete end date on this unnecessary war,” Lee was quoted as saying by the online magzaine The Politico.
The shift by Lee, who last week voted against advancing the Pelosi plan as part of the deliberations by the Appropriations Committee, is especially significant. It is likely to free up a number of other anti-war Democrats in the House to vote with Pelosi.
Where does this leave the debate over the bill?
Most Republicans will oppose it, as will a handful of Democrats — some of them Blue Dog conservatives who support the war, some of them anti-war progressives such as Ohio Congressman Dennis Kucinich.
But with most of the key players on the anti-war flank of the Democratic caucus in the House signing on, Pelosi’s proposal now appears far more likely to be passed than it did just a few days ago. It needs 218 votes, and there is a distinct possibility that the votes of Lee, Waters, Watson and Woolsey could secure its success.
Bush continues to promise a veto of any such measure.
John Nichols’ new book is THE GENIUS OF IMPEACHMENT: The Founders’ Cure for Royalism. Rolling Stone’s Tim Dickinson hails it as a “nervy, acerbic, passionately argued history-cum-polemic [that] combines a rich examination of the parliamentary roots and past use of the ‘heroic medicine’ that is impeachment with a call for Democratic leaders to ‘reclaim and reuse the most vital tool handed to us by the founders for the defense of our most basic liberties.’”
Copyright ©2007 The Nation
Progressive Democrats: Isn’t it time to speak to these “representatives” in the only language they can understand?
Go to http://switch2green.org.
Nichols, supposedly a “progressive”, seems to be missing the essential feature here. Namely, that the current bill is a PRO-WAR bill, which funds the war with over $100 billion, & allows it to continue without any serious limitation. The only supposed limitations are filled with loopholes & easy to get around.
This is a crushing DEFEAT for sanity, and — despite the MSM spin — a victory for Bush. It’s 99% of what he wanted.
Yet Nichols seems to be all wrapped up in whether or not the Pelosi measure gets 218 votes or not.
Does it really matter that the bill has Pelosi’s name on it? Except for some vague toothless language suggesting that some troops may be “re-deployed” in a year and a half, this bill is exactly what a Republican Congress would have produced.
Sorry to read that the ladies retreated from their position. Surprized really, I didn’t think that would happen. At least, one can count on Kucinich as he stays consistent. He reminds me of Wellstone, unwavering, and doesn’t sell out. What a disappointment for all of us who just recently marched, held signs and gathered to protest US government policy. I told a fellow demonstrator last week end, lets hope that we won’t be meeting again next year and if we do gather perhaps it’ll be global warming or some other issue. Representative democracy is dead.
The Nation (a pack of liars) gets their facts wrong on this article as with most of their articles:
Here is Barbara Lee’s statement:
“As someone who opposed this war from the beginning, I have voted against every single penny for this war and found myself today in the difficult position of having to choose between voting against funding for the war or for establishing timelines to end it.
While as a matter of conscience I cast my vote against the funding, I hope that this passage of this bill marks the beginning of the end of the Iraq war, but the real fight still lies ahead. Congress will continue to have to confront the issue of this war and occupation, and I am committed to continuing to push to fully fund the safe withdrawal of our troops from Iraq at the earliest practicable date and for timelines for withdrawal that are backed up by the appropriations power that the Constitution grants to Congress.”