When Republicans controlled Congress, the opposition Democrats regularly zinged them for failing to attend to their most basic duties: funding the federal government. When appropriations bills were late in enactment, Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi and others argued that it was because of some combination of laziness, sloppiness, political games, and apathy about the requirements of the job. How to explain the conscious decision by Democrats to follow the same course? The occasion for this observation is the fresh warning from the Department of Defense that our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan are endangered by the refusal of Congress to provide needed funding for the war:
Pentagon leaders, who have grown increasingly impatient with Congress’s slow action on war funding, warned that they need $16.8 billion in the still-pending request to pay soldiers past June. Wartime operations accounts will run dry by July, they said. In addition, $43.6 billion requested for new equipment — including $2.2 billion for 300,000 new sets of body armor — is tied to congressional approval of the remaining FY08 war request, according to Pentagon officials who briefed reporters on the defense budget Monday. “Delay degrades our ability to operate and sustain the force at home and in theater and makes it difficult to manage this department in a way that is fiscally sound,” Gates said. Of the $189.3 billion requested for Iraq and Afghanistan for FY08, Congress has approved $86.8 billion, including $16.8 billion for mine-resistant vehicles.
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