Republicans: Show Us Your Hand
By SusanUnPC on July 17, 2007 at 11:33 PM in Current Affairs, Democrats, Iraq
By SusanUnPC: You know that Senate Democrats are forcing the Republicans to debate Iraq all night. The latest is that Speaker Nancy Pelosi is leading “a march of House members from the House to the Senate tonight to lend their support to Senate Democrats” …
Howard Dean just sent out a great e-mail titled, “Put on a pot of coffee”:
It’s going to be a long night for the U.S. Senate.
Senate Republicans are threatening to filibuster a bill by Senators Levin and Reed that would require President Bush to begin troop withdrawal within 120 days, with most coming home by April 2008.
But Senator Majority Leader Reid has decided that he’s not going to let them just make a threat and walk away — he’s going to make them stand up in front of the American people and show them just how much they want to stay in Iraq. A few Republicans have started to say the right things, but we don’t know whether they actually have the backbone to stand with the American people and vote the right way, and the threat of a filibuster gives them all the cover they need.
Now, let’s not kid ourselves: they can filibuster, and we probably won’t have the votes to stop them. But if Senate Republicans are against ending the war, then they should show it by voting against the legislation — a straight-up-and-down vote on a bill that the majority of Americans support. That’s how a democratic government works.
Instead, they’re threatening to block the vote, and we’re going to force them to explain themselves in front of the American people.
Send your Senators a message right now:
The news reports are rightly emphasizing the need to make the Republicans declare their opposition to protecting our troops — by refusing to support the Levin-Reed amendment (similar to Webb’s amendment last week and to Rep. Skelton’s amendment passed in the House).
The rare, round-the-clock session tonight through Wednesday morning is intended to bait Republicans into an exhaustive debate on the politically unpopular war, as well as punish GOP members for routinely blocking anti-war legislation.
NYT:
Reaching for a tried-and-true Senate practice, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said he would force lawmakers to go on record in votes around the clock until a procedural showdown Wednesday morning on a proposal to begin withdrawing troops within 120 days, with most troops out by next spring. He said Republicans were using the threat of a filibuster, which can only be cleared with 60 votes, to protect President Bush from a policy rebuke.
“This week we’ll make Republicans answer for their refusal to allow an up or down vote on the most important issue facing our country today,” Mr. Reid said. “We’re going to work today. We’re going to work tomorrow and work tomorrow night. We’re going to continue working on this until we get a vote on this amendment.”
Perhaps the most eloquent voice I’ve heard was that of Sen. Carl Levin last night on PBS Newshour. (By the way, Sen. Chuck Hagel (R-NE) has signed on to the Levin/Reed amendment.)
This was one of those occasions where a non-commercial setting like PBS’s Newshour proved its worth — where Levin, with his calm, professorial manner with his eyeglasses balanced halfway down his nose, was allowed to speak at length, rather than in soundbites or constantly interrupted by the likes of a Chris Matthews, about his amendment and his hopes to bring the Senate to a consensus. There was so much that Sen. Levin said that was powerful and meaningful. You can listen, watch, or read the transcript here. Some snippets:
Levin Proposes Starting to Pull Troops from Iraq in Three Months
SEN. CARL LEVIN (D), Michigan: Well, what we do, Senator Jack Reed and I, is to say that American troops will begin to be reduced within the next 120 days or more technically 120 days after enactment of our amendment. And then the transition to the new, limited missions will be completed by April of next year. And those new limited missions would be force protection and also a limited or a very pointed counterterrorism mission against al-Qaida.
But ours is the only amendment that we know of so far that is binding, that would tell the Iraqis that we are going to begin to take a step to force them to take responsibility for their own nation. It’s long overdue; the Iraqis have been fiddling while their Baghdad capital has been burning. And there is no solution in Iraq other than a political solution.
The only hope of ending the violence and avoiding an all-out civil war is if the political leaders of Iraq come together and work out those differences over the political issues that divide them, including resource sharing, including elections in the provinces, including the de-Baathification laws and so forth.
[...]
SEN. CARL LEVIN: Well, I don’t want our troops in the middle of a civil war. That’s not the limited mission that we’re talking about, that anybody’s talking about here, that the Baker-Hamilton people talked about. It’s not to get in the middle of their civil war; it’s to get out of the middle of their civil war and to force them to avoid an all-out civil war by working out the differences.
It’s not that we need a larger force to prevent them from having a civil war. We’ve got to start reducing the forces to force them to reach a political compromise to avoid an all-out civil war.
I was also impressed by both Woodruff’s questions and Sen. Levin’s expressed concerns for the Iraqi people:
JUDY WOODRUFF: And what about the fate, Senator, of those Iraqis who have been supportive — of Iraqi civilians in general, and particularly those who have been supportive of the U.S. mission?
SEN. CARL LEVIN: The current course is endangering the people of Iraq continually. It’s the current course which isn’t working; it’s the current course which has led to huge slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis. It’s that course which has to change.
And there’s only one group that can change it, and that’s the Iraqi political leaders. And if they can’t do it, the parliament over there, their assembly, ought to get a government in place which can accomplish a political settlement.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And just to broaden that out, Senator, the notion that there is maybe some moral responsibility on the part of the United States, because it was the United States who came in over four years ago, who has led this war in Iraq, participated in this war, and now to pull out, what responsibility does the U.S. have to the people of that country?
SEN. CARL LEVIN: I think we’ve got a huge responsibility. The way this government went in, the way the Bush administration went in unilaterally, arrogantly, the way in which we didn’t wait for the U.N. to give its support to what we were doing, the way we did in the first Gulf War, there’s a huge moral responsibility.
And we have a huge responsibility to the Iraqi refugees. There are now four million Iraqi refugees, half in the country who’ve been moved out of their homes, the other half outside of the Iraq. And you bet we have a moral responsibility.
And the bigger responsibility here rests with the Iraqi political leaders. And since, by their own words, by everybody’s agreement there is no military solution, there’s only a political solution, we shouldn’t wait any longer to force the Iraqi leaders to undertake that political solution. …
by Ronald Scott
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