“A Big Mistake” Vote Gives Bush His Iraq Money
Despite the results of last November’s elections, which gave them the authority to check and balance George Bush, and despite polls that show roughly two-thirds of Americans want them to do so, Democrats are not quite ready to say “no” to the president’s demand for more money to wage the war that he pleases in Iraq.
On the critical Senate vote on whether to hand Bush a blank check he sought, 37 Democrats and so-called “Democrat” Joe Lieberman of Connecticut voted with the White House. They joined with 42 Republicans — including Nebraska Senator Chuck Hagel, who talks a good anti-war line but votes with the administration when push comes to shove — to pass the $120 billion supplemental spending bill.
Against the 80 votes for perpetual war were 14 “no” votes. Three came from conservative Republicans — North Carolina’s Richard Burr, Oklahoma’s Tom Coburn and Wyoming’s Mike Enzi — who objected to the pricey domestic initiatives and policies that were attached to the measure in an attempt to render it more palatable.
That left nine Democrats and one independent who caucuses with the Democrats, Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, objecting to giving Bush the go ahead to keep his war going through 2008, and perhaps to January 20, 2009.
The Democrats who voted “no” were: California’s Barbara Boxer, New York’s Hillary Clinton, Connecticut’s Chris Dodd, Wisconsin’s Russ Feingold, Massachusetts’ Edward Kennedy and John Kerry, Vermont’s Patrick Leahy, Illinois’ Barack Obama, Rhode Island’s Sheldon Whitehouse and Oregon’s Ron Wyden.
Clinton, Obama and Dodd are all 2008 presidential candidates. Dodd gets the highest marks, as he was out front in his opposition to the spending bill, while Obama and Clinton took the right stand only after Dodd and another Democratic contender, John Edwards, turned up the heat on the frontrunners — as did activist groups such as Progressive Democrats for America and MoveOn.org.
The Senate vote was the most closely watched, because of its potential impact on the Democratic presidential contest and because it provided a clearer measure of Democratic willingness to stand up to Bush.
In the House, where the spending bill was split into two parts, the calculus was more complex. But Democrats still showed their divisions when it comes to challenging Bush’s warmaking.
On the question of whether to give Bush all the money and more that he sought to keep his war going, the vote was 280-142 in favor. Republicans cast the majority of “yes” votes, 194. But 86 Democrats — including the House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Maryland, and a number of key committee and sub-committee chairs — joined the “yes” camp.
Voting “no” were 14O Democrats — including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-California, and Appropriations Committee chair David Obey, D-Wisconsin, the man who negotiated the bill — and two Republicans with steady records of anti-war voting, Tennessee’s John Duncan and Texan Ron Paul. Obey called the process that ended in the president getting the money he wanted with no timeline for withdrawal and inconsequential “benchmarks” a “step forwrad” to the fight to end the war.
But it didn’t feel like that to Feingold, the first Democrat to call for a withdrawal timeline and an outspoken advocate for using Congress’ “power of the purse” to bring the troops home. Calling Congress’ compromise with the White House “a failure,” Feingold said, “This is the first real turn in the wrong direction in several months. I regret it, and I think it’s a big mistake.”
So what are we left with? Not much to be encouraged by. Pelosi says this is not the end of the fight, that Democrats will press the president when additional Iraq spending demands come to the Congress in the summer and fall. The speaker’s sincere; she does hold out hope for a turn of events that will make it possible to block Bush. And there is no reason not to wish her well. But the fact is that Democrats in the House and Senate remain divided to the point of dysfunction. And the anti-war camp is still far short of the numbers it needs to get Congress to check and balance Bush, not just in the Congress as a whole but in the Democratic caucuses of the House and Senate.
While it seemed in recent weeks that Congress might actually be prepared to stand up to the president, Feingold said Thursday “we are moving backward.”
“Instead of forcing the President to safely redeploy our troops, instead of coming up with a strategy providing assistance to a post-redeployment Iraq, and instead of a renewed focus on the global fight against al-Qaeda,” the frustrated senator said, “we are faced with a spending bill that kicks the can down the road and buys the Administration time.”
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
As a former Marine, I am truly ashamed to be an American……..
Impeachment is off the table??? Pfffftttt………
The blame for giving in to the president goes directly to Pelosi. She has failed the American people by her actions as speaker. She should have led the House in accordance with the wishes of the American people. Instead she continues to play games in the city on the hill while thousands die in Iraq. It’s worse than shameful. It’s the status quo in the United States of Everything.
I’m also a former Marine and I was so ashamed of America that I left it. That was in 1988. Since then I’ve found no reason to change my mind.
Hoa binh
Fed Up May 25th, 2007 1:18 pm
Ditto…. I come from multi generational Army and I continue to be sickened to the core….
It IS really depressing to see our elections trashed like this. What good does it do to vote if it doesn’t make a difference?
I know that in a few days I will have to pick up the torch again, but it will take some grieftime first before that happens.
There is nothing left to do but get back into it and stick it to the dunderheads.
It is refreshing to find “enlightened” warriors on this site. It’s been said that the enlightened warrior best understands the benefits of peace having seen the ravages of war up close. Notice how Germany was the sane friend making full use of its war experience to recognize the inanity of the Iraqi blood-for-profit shindig, with France also showing the courage of intelligence over brute force. America was not ready for the lesson; and as other contributors have noted, the embedding of the military industrial complex into virtually every state’s fiscal machinery has made it very difficult for representatives to not give the MILITARY its blank check via this CEO of America, war for hire, excuse for a prez.
WTF? Where’s Their Filibuster?
” If an American is concerned only about his nation, he will not be concerned about the peoples of Asia, Africa, or South America. Is this not why nations engage in the madness of war without the slightest sense of penitence? Is this not why the murder of a citizen of your own nation is a crime, but the murder of citizens of another nation in war is an act of heroic virtue? ”
Martin Luther King, Jr.
The essence of oligarchical rule is not father-to-son inheritance, but the persistence of a certain world-view and a certain way of life … A ruling group is a ruling group so long as it can nominate its successors… Who wields power is not important, provided that the hierarchical structure remains always the same.”
George Orwell, 1984
“[America] is most fully a nation, most intensely alive as an entity, when it wages war against other nations. Even in peacetime it is the memory of past wars and the menace of future wars that keep the idea of the nation alive in America. War and the cult of the nation are virtually one and the same.”
Walter Karp
“If we add up the current Pentagon budget, the nuclear weapons budget of the Energy Department, the military portion of the NASA budget, foreign military aid, veterans’ benefits, interest payments on debt incurred by past military spending and other military-related expenses, the US spends over $670 billion a year to feed its addiction to war.”
book - Addicted to War
“War allows us to rise above our small stations in life. We find nobility in a cause and feelings of selflessness and even bliss. And at a time of soaring deficits and financial scandals and the very deterioration of our domestic fabric, war is a fine diversion… War gives us a distorted sense of self; it gives us meaning.”
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Times
“War, we have come to believe, is a spectator sport. The military and the press … have turned war into a vast video arcade game. Its very essence- death - is hidden from public view.”
Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for New York Times
I apologize to those who read all the articles on commondreams, but I want to reach as many people as I can. This information has me completely freaked out.
A Presidential Directive was signed by President Bush on May 9th giving him unconstrained powers in case of a national emergency. In the case of a national emergency (terrorist attack), I don’t want that psychopath in charge of anything. How can he get away with this? It’s terrifying!!!
worldnetdaily.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=55825
© 2007 WorldNetDaily.com
President Bush has signed a directive granting extraordinary powers to the office of the president in the event of a declared national emergency, apparently without congressional approval or oversight.
The “National Security and Homeland Security Presidential Directive
” was
signed May 9, notes Jerome R. Corsi in a WND column
.
It was issued with the dual designation of NSPD-51, as a National Security Presidential Directive, and HSPD-20, as a Homeland Security Presidential Directive.
The directive establishes under the office of the president a new national continuity coordinator whose job is to make plans for “National Essential Functions” of all federal, state, local, territorial and tribal governments,
as well as private sector organizations to continue functioning under the president’s directives in the event of a national emergency.
“Catastrophic emergency” is loosely defined as “any incident, regardless of location, that results in extraordinary levels of mass casualties, damage,
or disruption severely affecting the U.S. population, infrastructure, environment, economy, or government functions.”
It says the president can assume the power to direct any and all government and business activities until the emergency is declared over.
The directive says the assistant to the president for Homeland Security and Counterterrorism, currently Frances Fragos Townsend
, would be designated as the national continuity coordinator.
Corsi says the directive makes no attempt to reconcile the powers created for the national continuity coordinator with the National Emergency Act
,
which requires that such proclamation “shall immediately be transmitted to the Congress and published in the Federal Register.”
A Congressional Research Service study notes the National Emergency Act sets up Congress as a balance empowered to “modify, rescind, or render dormant” such emergency authority if Congress believes the president has acted
inappropriately.
But the new directive appears to supersede the National Emergency Act by creating the new position of national continuity coordinator without any specific act of Congress authorizing the position, Corsi says.
The directive also makes no reference to Congress and its language appears to negate any requirement that the president submit to Congress a determination that a national emergency exists.
It suggests instead that the powers of the directive can be implemented without any congressional approval or oversight.
Homeland Security spokesman Russ Knocke affirmed to Corsi the Homeland Security Department would implement the requirements of the order under
Townsend’s direction.
The White House declined to comment on the directive.
I too am a Veteran WWII Seabee South Pacific. I never in any nightmare thought that the United States would ever be destroyed by a moron (Bush)The people who voted for this fool are just as guilty as this most corrupt administration. I said long ago Russ Feingold should be president. Feingold is one smart man We should start flooding the media for Feingold and maybe he would run.You know when you hear on the news that 10.000 people attended the funeral of Jerry Falwell one of the biggest bigot’s (and I’m being kind just calling him a bigot)that tells you that million’s of people can’t think for themselves, to me anyone who belives Falwell is a moron.Don’t misunderstan I believe in God and attend church every Sunday but I don’t think politic’s has a place in the church.
WHY DO THEY HATE US SO MUCH?? (the all-time most audacious question asked by supremacist xenophobic Yanks and their Fascist allies)
——————————————————————————–
Read that question w/ some whining noise added to it for fun!!!
This is a response from a world citizen to the all-time most naive question I have heard/read so much from the so-called analysts, writers, politicians, and hands of IMPERIALISM in your dishonest media.
In your undying, never-ending hatred for Iran and drowned in an ocean of narcissism, you simply have forgotten, or yet better, chosen to forget, the crimes, inhumane policies, arrogant attitudes, and pain inflicted by you “patriotic” psychos on many a nation, including Persians.
Well, the Northern Christian hypocrisy and self-love on one side; its harsh animosity and blood thirst for Iran is something else. It was evident in your clownish, arrogant President’s speeches and now it’s epitomized by the most blatantly hateful, Nazi pieces of propaganda which Goebbels himself would love you for ), there it comes, suck it and swallow it w/ AMERICAN (w/ a thick R the way you like it) pride and xenophobia.
By what I have read from the likes of you in your very “OBJECTIVE” media (no shortage in the ” objective, informed, and bright” nation of yours), you completely epitomize what the monstrous Northern Christian imperialism means to billions of impoverished, victimized, oppressed masses of the world and what it has done for the past several centuries only in order to secure its own filthy interests derived from your selfish, self-indulged, self-centered, egotistic, materialist, and Calvinist lifestyles and worldviews. If and only if you were interested in the truth and facts, you could easily find the answer by reviewing your friends’ list and also crimes’ list for decades or centuries (for those Euro liberals!!). It doesn’t take a genius, does it?
YOU are the epitome of unfairness, injustice, governmental terrorism and bigotry. These are some of the crimes against humanity committed by your patriotic asses all over the planet (the list would be only too long but I mention a few here):
U.S. sponsored coup against democracy in Guatemala in 1954 which resulted in the deaths of over 120,000 Guatemalan peasants by U.S. installed dictatorships over the course of four decades.
U.S. overthrew the governments of the Dominican Republic in 1965 and helped to murder 3,000 people.
1973, the U.S. sponsored a coup in Chile against he democratic government of Salvador Allende and helped to murder another 30,000 people.
1965 the U.S. sponsored a coup in Indonesia that resulted in the murder of over 800,000 people, and the subsequent slaughter in 1975 of over 250,000 innocent people in East Timor by the Indonesian regime with the direct complicity of President Ford and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger
U.S. sponsored terrorist contra war (the World Court declared the U.S. government a war criminal in 1984 for the mining of the harbours) against Nicaragua in the 1980s which resulted in the deaths of over 30,000 innocent people (or as the U.S. government used to call them before the term “collateral damage” was invented–”soft targets”).
U.S. war against the people of El Salvador in the 1980s, which
resulted in the brutal deaths of over 80,000 people, or “soft targets”.
U.S. sponsored terror war against the peoples of southern Africa (especially Angola) that began in the 1970’s and resulted in the deaths and mutilations of over 1,000,000.
U.S. invaded Panama over the Christmas season of 1989 and killed over 5,000 in an attempt to capture George H. Bush’s CIA partner, now turned enemy, Manual Noriega.
U.S. sponsored a brutal coup that resulted in the deaths of over 70,000 Iranians from 1952-1978.
This doesn’t even mention the crimes in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Grenada, Bay of Pigs and before that the support for and direct involvement w/ Batista’s regime in Cuba, the 8-year war against Iran -including chemical weapons usage- by (the former friend!!) Saddam, death squads in Central America, the 5 decades of Israeli crimes in Palestine and Lebanon (the veto policy), the “missing” in Argentina, and of course the “silent coup” in Algeria in 91 (w/ deceitful cooperation from the French bastards) that stopped the FIS from winning the elections thus plunging the country into a civil war for years…………….
We can never forget your crimes or undying sense of self-love and ego that make the Yankees and their NATO/G7 lovers the most detested nations on this planet, perhaps galaxy.
Now kill as many innocent people as you want. LAUNCH, LAUNCH as a bastard called JAMES WOODS declared on JAY LENO. Brag about Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Beirut bombings. Brag about killing of the innocent family members of Kaddafi, all the countries’ leaders and revolutionaries who had the guts to say no to your Fascist Empire.
It matters not. The U.S. (and the British disgusting colonialism) will go where the Romans, German Nazis, Mongols, and the rest of the arrogant sorry excuses for humanity went. Now celebrate killing Moslems, Nationalists, and Leftists (not to mention nuns and priests), etc. in your never-ending fire of hatred, supremacy and ego.
Unlike many other foreigners, I am not simplistic enough to think you are just the minority and the “rest” are simply decent, nice, culture-loving individuals. The fact is it’s filth like you that votes for the criminals you call leaders (Reagan and Bushes, Blair, Merkel, Harper and Howard come to mind immediately). Also I don’t think, despite the popular belief, you are ignorant or just stupid; I think you know enough and simply choose to ignore because you are the most selfish, inhumane, robotic bastards this planet has seen for a long time. Your sense of “SELECTIVE MEMORY and JUDGMENT” is proof enough.
I think legendary Orwell got it right in this passage from Nineteen Eighty-Four, an account of the ultimate supremacist empire:
“And in the general hardening of outlook that set in . . . practices which had been long abandoned - imprisonment without trial, the use of war prisoners as slaves, public executions, torture to extract confessions . . . and the deportation of whole populations - not only became common again, but were tolerated and even defended by people who considered themselves enlightened and progressive.”
As a reaction to your actions, our (the South) hatred for you could only be compared to the feelings we have against Serbs, Nazis, Genghis Khan and Alexander the Criminal.
THE NEW ROME WILL FALL…… AND ITS FOLLOWERS, FRIENDS, ALLIES AND APOLOGISTS….. WE’LL MAKE SURE OF THAT. DEATH TO THE U.S. and EU!!!
By Pelosi’a own admission, this vote was not “whipped.” Instead, the Democrats were free to follow whatever moneyed interests they have in this war. Contrast this strategy to the arm twisting the Republicans did when they were in power–and for all the wrong policies. Pelosi is no leader–she’s protecting Bush rather than the Constitution or the American public. If she doesn’t put impeachment back on the table, we must organize to force her to.
The comments by Saladin74 were hard, but the truth of the matter is, each and every American should climb out of the box he or she has been hiding in a take a look at he world around them and see and feel what is happening. Capitalism is eating away at the world and her peoples. Where is the centre of this sickness, it is the USA, and from there it spreads like a nasty disease into the most remote and scared places on our planet. It is not enough to just change horses, a new way of thinking and acting is necessary and that can only happen from the people, like the constitution says, “We the People”. Stop making others responsible and break the patterns, make a difference with what you do. Stop acting like domesticated animals and exercise your power, no politician is going to change till we do. Take charge of your personal power and make a difference. You will be surprised at how quick things changes when we want them too. Become conscious of your own action, where does my energy go and what does it do? If I feed the monster, then I become the monster. It really is simple, take real responsibility for yourself and what you do, in your own family, your own house, in your community. That is really what democracy means, not a form of government, rather a responsibility of the people to the people. Stop thinking someone else needs to make a difference, roll up your sleeves and make the difference. Peace be with thee and spread the word……