[Peace-discuss] Democrats arrange huge amount to expand war

Fri Jul 2 12:05:33 CDT 2010

Exactly.

The late Abbie Hoffman observed, "God is dead ... and we did it for the kids!"

On 7/2/10 1:34 AM, E.Wayne Johnson wrote:
> Damn Good Thing that the central government is funding all those teachers.
> It's Building America's Future. It's for the Kids!
>
> It certainly will require some "education", maybe even re-education, for the
> next generation to fund, acquiesce to, and participate in the war.
>
> ***
>
> Bob Naiman suggested yesterday that Obey (that's his last Name, really. I
> wonder his nickname is Grovel.) and McGovern (What, Me Govern?) were all
> about being opposed to funding the war... but in the end they seemed to admit
> twas' all in jest and were good little puppies and voted Yea (for the
> record).
>
> Here's how they voted:
>
> http://clerk.house.gov/evs/2010/roll428.xml
>
> This vote on hr1500 forced passage of HR1493.
>
> H. Res. 1500: providing for consideration of the Senate amendments to the
> bill ( H.R. 4899) making emergency supplemental appropriations for disaster
> relief and summer jobs for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2010, and for
> other purposes
>
> In case you are interested in the text of HR1500: The text of H.RES.1500 has
> not yet been received from GPO Bills are generally sent to the Library of
> Congress from the Government Printing Office a day or two after they are
> introduced on the floor of the House or Senate. Delays can occur when there
> are a large number of bills to prepare or when a very large bill has to be
> printed.
>
> ----- Original Message ----- From: "C. G. Estabrook" <galliher at illinois.edu>
> To: "peace discuss" <Peace-discuss at lists.chambana.net> Sent: Friday, July 02,
> 2010 12:15 PM Subject: [Peace-discuss] Democrats arrange huge amount to
> expand war
>
>
>> ["Following the lead of Congressman Jim McGovern, many peace organizations
>>  declined during the past half year to put their full energies behind
>> demanding No votes on war funding." The Democrats continue to co-opt the
>> opposition to the war. --CGE]
>>
>> Democrats Forced to Cheat to Fund War By David Swanson
>>
>> The Democratic leadership in the House had to resort to an unusual and
>> underhanded tactic to pass war funding Thursday night.
>>
>> Congress has long tended to pass unrelated measures in combination with war
>>  bills, and usually some of these measures, such as funding schools, jobs,
>>  veterans care, or disaster relief, provide excuses for some "anti-war"
>> Democrats to vote for the war funding. But including good things with war
>> bills can lead the Republicans to vote No. When they all do that, as they
>> did last June, no more than about 40 Democrats can vote No or the bill
>> fails. Last June, the leadership and the White House were able to threaten
>> and bribe enough Democrats to vote yes on a bill that funded both war and
>> an IMF banker bailout. Only 32 Democrats voted No. On Thursday the House
>> leadership couldn't do that because over 40 Democrats refused to be bought
>> off. In fact, at least 51, and reportedly 80 to 90 had committed to voting
>> No.
>>
>> In theory, this should have resulted in separating the pig of war funding
>> from the lipstick of domestic spending. Both would then, in theory, have
>> easily passed the House as separate bills, with the domestic spending
>> facing an uncertain fate in the Senate as long as the leadership over there
>> keeps the filibuster rule in place. It would also have forced the
>> Democratic leadership to pass the war funding with more Republican votes
>> than Democratic.
>>
>> THE SELF-EXECUTING RULE
>>
>> But that's not what happened. Instead the Democratic Leadership produced
>> something called a self-executing rule. Typically, the House will vote on a
>>  rule for how a bill will be voted on, vote on amendments if the rule
>> permits any, and then vote on the bill. In this self-executing rule, the
>> bill was to be considered passed if at least one amendment to it was
>> approved. Otherwise it was to be considered dead. Either way, there would
>> be no vote on the bill. There was, however, a vote on the rule. But here's
>> the catch: it isn't considered polite and appropriate to vote against a
>> rule, and Americans are not expected to notice how anyone votes on a rule.
>> It's not a bill, but a procedural matter -- never mind if the procedure is
>> to pass war funding without another vote.
>>
>> So, we watched Republicans like Ron Paul speak against the war and the
>> rule, other Republicans speak in support of the war and against the rule,
>> and Democrats speak against the war and in support of the rule that would
>> fund it. We saw Democrats, like Congresswoman Maxine Waters, speak in
>> support of the rule that would fund the war on the grounds that she would
>> then get a chance to vote for an amendment to defund the war. Think about
>> that. Rather than blocking war funding, you support it in order to vote for
>> a doomed amendment which if passed would have to be approved by the Senate
>> and the President too. Not a single Democrat -- even those who would vote
>> against the rule -- spoke against it.
>>
>> In the end 38 Democrats, including very few progressives, voted No on the
>> rule, which passed 215 to 210. That's suspiciously close, and suggests that
>>  the leadership permitted those votes but no more.
>>
>> ESCALATING WAR, CUTTING SOCIAL SECURITY
>>
>> According to Congressman John Tierney, we now have 88,000 troops and
>> 110,000 contractors in Afghanistan. The $33.5 billion in war funding is to
>> send 30,000 more troops, plus more contractors, to Afghanistan (some of
>> whom are already there pre-funding). This was the vote to fund the
>> escalation that was debated in the U.S. media a half year ago. That passage
>> of time allowed this vote to come in the context of a debate in which
>> almost no one mentioned the word "escalation", no one at all objected to
>> the President having gone ahead with an unfunded escalation, and -- on the
>> contrary -- various congress members from both parties swore they had to
>> "support the troops" and others, such as Republican Congressmen Buck McKeon
>> and Jerry Lewis, asserted their responsibility to obey "our Commander in
>> Chief" as if the first branch of our government is now a branch of the
>> military.
>>
>> Speaker Nancy Pelosi slipped a surprising measure into a budget that was
>> passed as part of the rule, a measure requiring that the House vote on any
>>  proposals -- whatever they may be -- that are proposed by the president's
>>  deficit commission, if those proposals are passed by the Senate. As Jane
>> Hamsher immediately pointed out:
>>
>> "The commission, co-chaired by Erskine Bowles and Alan Simpson, is packed
>> with members who favor the raising the retirement age to 70, means testing,
>> and private accounts. Many also support investing 20% of the Social
>> Security trust fund in the stock market. It's ironic that yesterday Pelosi
>> sent out press releases criticizing John Boehner for expressing the very
>> same positions on cutting Social Security benefits that Jim Clyburn, Joe
>> Biden, and Steny Hoyer have. She's putting this language into the rule in
>> order to deflect responsibility from herself when it comes to the floor for
>> a vote during a lame duck session, since without her approval that could
>> never happen."
>>
>>
>> AMENDMENTS: 162 WANT SOME ROLE FOR CONGRESS
>>
>> Following the lead of Congressman Jim McGovern, many peace organizations
>> declined during the past half year to put their full energies behind
>> demanding No votes on war funding. Instead, many stressed the introduction
>> of anti-war amendments, arguing that we could get more votes that way.
>> Moving three more congress members to vote against the rule would have sent
>> the strongest message possible, but once that failed, there were four
>> amendments to vote on Thursday night, three of them related to the war. The
>> leadership had a way to handle these as well: take them up late at night,
>> past filing deadlines for newspaper stories.
>>
>> One was an amendment to eliminate military funding from the bill. This
>> failed 25 to 376 with 22 voting "present."
>>
>> Another was to limit military funding to withdrawal. This failed by
>> acclamation, and Congressman Anthony Weiner, chairing the proceedings,
>> moved on to the next amendment before anyone requested a count of the vote.
>> So we don't even now what the number of Yes votes was here.
>>
>> The third amendment, McGovern's, was to require the president to present
>> Congress with 1) a new National Intelligence Estimate on Afghanistan by
>> January 31, 2011 and 2) a plan by April 4, 2011, on "the safe, orderly and
>>  expeditious redeployment of U.S. troops from Afghanistan, including a
>> timeframe for the completion of the redeployment." In addition -- and this
>> was a late addition to the amendment strengthening it considerably --
>> Congress would be required to vote by July 2011 "if it wants to allow the
>> obligation and expenditure of funds for Afghanistan in a manner that is not
>> consistent with the president's announced policy of December 2009 to begin
>> to drawdown troops by July 2011." This amendment failed by a vote of 162 to
>> 260.
>>
>> The 162 included a handful of Republicans and represented a significant
>> number of congress members willing to at least go on record as somewhat
>> favoring minimal involvement for Congress in one of its chief areas of
>> responsibility: war. I say "somewhat" because we don't know how many of the
>> 162 would still have voted Yes if pressured by the leadership not to.
>>
>> The non-war-related amendment, to fund teachers and disaster relief, passed
>>  239 to 181 with 1 voting "present." This vote, heavily promoted by
>> teachers' unions -- which tended never to mention the war funding --
>> guaranteed passage of the war funding, since the rule required that at
>> least one amendment pass.
>>
>> THE SENATE AND THE PRESIDENT
>>
>> The Senate is out of session for the anti-imperial imperial holiday of July
>>  4th. It will have to deal with the House bill, which differs from the
>> Senate version.
>>
>> The President on Thursday threatened to veto the bill because of an item in
>>  one of the two non-war-related amendments. Congress is careful to pay for
>>  non-war items with cuts elsewhere, while funding wars on a Chinese credit
>>  card. In order to pay for funds to save some teachers from layoffs at US
>> schools, the amendment took away a small fraction of a slush fund used by
>> the Secretary of Education to encourage corporatist approaches to
>> education. Let's hope that, if the Senate doesn't strip out the offending
>> provision for him, our president follows through and blocks an escalation
>> of a war.
>>
>>
>> --
>>
>> David Swanson is the author of the new book "Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial
>>  Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union" by Seven Stories Press. You
>> can order it and find out when tour will be in your town:
>> http://davidswanson.org/book.
>>
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>>
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