I am just going from what I observed on C-SPAN2 and not any official tally, but it appears that Republicans Gordon Smith (OR) and Chuck Hagel (NE) voted against Thad Cochran’s amendment to strip troop withdrawals from the Iraq War Supplemental Bill. Lieberman and Mark Pryor (AR) voted for the amendment and Tim Jonhson and someone else did not vote. The amendment failed 48-50. This means that the troop withdrawals will remain in the bill.
Update [2007-3-27 18:0:20 by BooMan]: Here is something remarkable. Senator Michael Enzi of Wyoming did not vote. He’s up for re-election and I guess he didn’t want to stand by his buddy Dick Cheney. What a slap in the face.
After the vote Majority Leader Reid made some brief remarks. He said that the bill was ‘a mess’ and that he had to sit down with Minority Leader McConnell and figure out where they were going from here. He said that he had received over 100 proposed amendments and that his staff would be up all night figuring out which ones were germane. He said that they would have a vote on cloture in the morning.
It’s impossible, based on that information, for me to predict what will happen. It’s possible that there will be some amendment introduced that will weaken the House bill in some catastrophic way. But, right now it looks like a better than 50% bet that the Congress is going to pass a supplemental bill calling for the beginning of withdrawal of troops in Iraq within 120 days.
I have to double check the language of the bill on that because, even though that is how C-SPAN is describing the bill, I remember that the President can buy another 120 days by certifying that the Iraqi government is meeting their benchmarks. Either way, if this passes, it is an acknowledgment that the war is lost.
The President has said he will veto this bill. It’s hard to see how he wins by doing so. If he wants to play chicken with Congress, I think he will lose.
A tip of the hat to Senators Smith and Hagel for making this possible. And it would not have been possible without our victories in Virginia, Montana, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Rhode Island. We needed every last vote.
