[Peace-discuss] Melinda Henneberger on Johnson's vote against the escalation

[Robert Naiman]

Conservative Republican Follows District to Oppose Escalation
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/melinda-henneberger/conservative-republican-f_b_41446.html

The Huffington Post   |   Melinda Henneberger   |  Posted February 16,
2007 07:58 PM
Contact/tips: melinda at huffingtonpost.com

WASHINGTON - Republican Congressman Tim Johnson's district in central
and southern Illinois is farm country, and even its Democrats tend to
be conservative. The 15th, where I grew up, does not swing, period;
President Bush took 59 percent of the vote there in '04. And though
Champaign, where Johnson was born and raised, is a college town, the
University of Illinois has never been confused with Berkeley.

So Johnson, a lawyer who until recently owned a little farm on the
side, surprised no one with his steady support of the president, from
the time they both arrived in Washington in January of '01. He voted
for the Bush tax cuts, for the bill that restricted liability for gun
makers, for a ban on partial-birth abortion and on same-sex marriage,
too. He was never particularly close to the former Speaker, Denny
Hastert, it's true, and did buck the leadership on opening the Alaska
National Wildlife Refuge for oil drilling.

But when he broke with his party today -- as one of only 17
Republicans to side with Democrats on a resolution opposing the
president's decision to send more troops into Iraq -- he made clear
that he was only following the lead of his constituents. He should
know; until today, Johnson's claim to fame was the 200 phone calls he
makes back home every day, calls that have convinced him the voters
there are thoroughly fed up with the war, too.

"He considers himself a conservative, but it isn't only the liberals"
who no longer support the president's leadership on Iraq, said
Johnson's spokesman, Phil Bloomer. "It's a matter of his own
observation about the way the war has been conducted. But he's
obsessed with calling everybody in the district all the time, and he
hears the same thing everywhere, from Mattoon to Mount Carmel."

Other Republicans who voted with the Democrats today included Tom
Davis, an Army vet whose district in Northern Virginia is becoming
more Democratic. "Knowing what we know today," Davis said on the House
floor, "after almost four years of attempted nation building on the
shifting sands of Iraq, the plan to put 21,000 more Americans in
harm's way there has to be viewed with a cold-eyed skepticism born of
that hard experience. Putting American troops between feuding Sunni
and Shia in the middle of Baghdad is a mistake."

The only two Democrats who broke with their party today were Gene
Taylor, of Mississippi, and Jim Marshall, of Georgia. Marshall's
spokesman explained, "Jim isn't necessarily in favor of the surge; in
fact, he's on record as being against it." But?

"Jim is a Vietnam vet, from a military family and a military culture,"
said the spokesman, Doug Moore, "so he will never do anything that
might undermine morale. This is one of the harder votes he's taken;
Jim would rather this vote hadn't come up."

When I asked Taylor's communications director, Courtney Littig, why
her boss had voted as he had, she said, "That's an excellent question;
we'd like to know, too. We thought we knew which way he was going,"
but guessed wrong. Since the vote, she said, she hadn't heard from
him: "I know he's not going to hide from it. But the phones are all
lit up."