Cox & Forkum,  Iraq,  Iraq War

Cox & Forkum: War Power

cox&forkum07.01.30.WarPower

Cox & Forkum: War Power

AP: Congress to test bounds of its war power

President Bush may be the decision maker, but the Democratic-controlled Congress holds the purse strings. Whether to yank them shut when it comes to the conflict in Iraq, and under what conditions, is the question facing newly empowered majority Democrats.

No one challenges the notion that Congress can stop a war by canceling its funding. In fact, Vice President Dick Cheney challenged Congress to back up its objections to Bush’s plan to put 21,500 more troops in Iraq by zeroing out the war budget.

Underlying Cheney’s gambit is the consensus understanding that such a drastic move is doubtful because it would be fraught with political peril.

But there are other legislative options to force the war’s end, say majority Democrats and some of Bush’s traditional Republican allies.

The alternatives range from capping the number of troops permitted in Iraq to cutting off funding for troop deployments beyond a certain date or setting an end date for the war.

“The Constitution makes Congress a coequal branch of government. It’s time we start acting like it,” said Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., who is chairing a hearing Tuesday on Congress’ war powers and forwarding legislation to eventually prohibit funding for the deployment of troops to Iraq.

His proposal, like many others designed to force an end to U.S. involvement in the bloody conflict, is far from having enough support even to come up for a vote on the Senate floor.

Closer to that threshold is a nonbinding resolution declaring that Bush’s proposal to send 21,500 more troops to Baghdad and Anbar province is “not in the national interest.” The Senate could take up that measure early next month.

But some senators, complaining that the resolution is symbolic, are forwarding tougher bills.

Maybe it will be Senator Barack Obama?

Obama calls for US combat troops out of Iraq by March 2008

Likely presidential contender Senator Barack Obama called for the removal of all US combat forces from Iraq by March 31, 2008, to counter what he called President George W. Bush’s “failed policy of escalation.”

“The American people have waited, the American people have been patient. We have given chance after chance for a resolution that has not come,” Obama said on the floor of the US Senate, as he pledged to introduce legislation calling for the troop pull out.

“The time for waiting in Iraq are over. The days of our open-ended commitment must come to a close, and the need to bring this war to an end is here,” said the Illinois Democrat, a leading contender for his party’s presidential nomination in 2008.

“In a civil war where no military solution exists, this redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve the political settlement between its warring factions that can slow the bloodshed and promote stability,” Obama said.

The legislation he proposed, dubbed the “Iraq War De-escalation Act of 2007,” would reverse what Obama called the administration’s “dangerous and ill-conceived escalation.”


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