[Peace-discuss] Can Congress stop the war(s), and how?

[C. G. Estabrook]

The Democrats' hand-wringing "We'd like to stop the war in Iraq and the 
invasion of Iran, but there's just no way to do it," is disingenuous. 
It seems to me a good example of what Sartre called "bourgeois bad faith."

The Republicans are quite right to assail the Senate Democrats on their 
non-binding resolution (and their hypocritical unwillingness to allow 
the Republican resolution to come to a vote as well) and to demand that 
they vote to cut off funds except for withdrawal, if they oppose Bush's 
war as they say they do.

The Democrats could either stop the funding bills with a filibuster, or 
change the cloture rule and pass their own funding bill with 51 votes. 
The Republicans showed them how to do that in the last Congress: they 
called it grandiosely "the nuclear option," and they were talking about 
judgeships!  With the administration threatening to attack Iran, 
"nuclear option" is not a metaphor.

The Democrats must either use the filibuster -- or paradoxically, 
destroy it -- to deny Bush a real nuclear option.  --CGE




Morton K. Brussel wrote:
> *Seven Questions: Can Congress Stop the Iraq War?*
> * *
> Posted February 2007 
> 
> 
> *When President Bush announced he was sending more troops to Iraq, many 
> in Congress rushed to condemn the move. For this week’s Seven Questions, 
> **FP** asked Bruce Ackerman, a top legal scholar at Yale University, 
> what Congress can do to back up its words with deeds.*
>