The Senate will likely wait until next year to attempt to pass another bill to end the war after abandoning plans to take up anti-war legislation last week. Sen. Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., threw in the towel by ending debate on a defense policy bill that was to serve as a vehicle for Iraq-related provisions.
“People either want something or nothing,” Reid said, explaining the failure to find a Senate compromise on an Iraq amendment.
Reid said the Senate would likely wait until it takes up President Bush’s $190 billion war supplemental spending request before attempting to pass war-related legislation again.
According to Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, D-Mich., the Senate may not consider the war funding bill until “next February perhaps.”
Reid would not confirm Levin’s assessment of the timing, but agreed that the war-funding request “is where you are going to see the next dogfight.”
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Friday the House can no longer wait for the Senate to act and announced this week it will take up a trio of Iraq provisions, though they are far weaker than proposals the Senate failed to push forward last week.
Among the bills the House will debate is a measure co-authored by Reps. John Tanner, D-Tenn., and Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, that would require Bush to come up with a redeployment plan for the troops within a month. Two additional bills are aimed at curbing contracting abuse and improving government oversight in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Reid said he did not know whether the Tanner-Abercrombie measure or the other measures stood a chance of passing in the Senate.
Perhaps indicative of its weakness as an anti-war measure, the provision is headed for bipartisan passage in the House.
House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio, called it a “common-sense bill” that most Republicans will support.
The Senate dropped its anti-war efforts last week after failing to reach a 60-vote threshold needed to pass several Iraq-related provisions, including one sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., that would have increased troop rest time and another by Levin that would have set a nine-month deadline for troop withdrawal.
Levin last week attempted to compromise with Republicans by removing the firm deadline and instead setting a goal for withdrawal, but that move cost him the support of most Democrats.
“We want the president to be forced to do something, not just put in a bunch of benchmarks,” Reid said.
The failure to pass those bills, Pelosi said, “spoke very eloquently to the fact that we in the House cannot confine our aspirations for changing the direction in Iraq to what might be possible today in the United States Senate.”
The anti-war momentum in Congress has waned since Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq, delivered a progress report earlier this month that showed military progress in the country but little movement reaching political benchmarks.
Boehner said the lack of anti-war bills in both chambers shows that Democratic leaders are now saying,” Well, we don’t really need to do this.”
