It’s bad enough that we are funding the troops in Iraq and Afghanistan with another (non-budgeted) supplemental funding bill. I know that Obama will budget for this next and year and that we are working off Bush’s last budget, but it still is a perpetuation of a fundamentally dishonest practice. What’s really troubling, though, is that we continue the practice (established by the Republicans) of attaching otherwise unpassable legislation to war funding bills as a way of strong-arming Congress into voting for it. This time, it’s over $100 billion for the International Monetary Fund to bail out the global economy. It’s the fulfillment of a promise that Obama made at the G20 meeting in London, so I understand why the Democrats are attaching it to the war spending. It’s the only way to get the money appropriated. Ironically, though, the House Republicans are still going to vote against the IMF money even though that means they will be voting to leave the troops stranding in the field with nothing but their dirty jockstraps. And, do you know what that means? That means that Democrats who promised not to vote for any more war funding that didn’t have firm withdrawal strings attached now are under relentless pressure to break their promises, or the whole bill will fail.
Isn’t that special how the administration changed and the Congress changed and it is still the anti-war Democrats who have all the pressure on them?
I think it’s special. One thing you can say for the Republicans is that they aren’t scared of being accused of not supporting the troops. Now, I am personally ambivalent about this bill. I am not sure I would vote for it (if I were in Congress, I would study it carefully), but I also don’t necessarily want to see a giant train wreck. I have concerns about the plan for Afghanistan and about how the IMF money is going to be spent. I understand and even advocate the need to play hardball now and then. The Republicans are rank hypocrites on this issue, as they are on so many others. But I don’t have to like how this is all going down. I don’t think I’ll cry if the House refuses to pass the supplemental. It will make Obama look bad, including to the international community. But, sometimes, the way our government goes about its business, it deserves to look bad.
