House Democrats returning from the August recess plan to press ahead with legislation to end the war in Iraq, despite some evidence that the recent troop surge is succeeding.
About 100 lawmakers reaffirmed their anti-war position in a conference call Thursday with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif. The House reconvenes Sept. 4.
The main sentiment expressed by the members, according to one participant, was, “We need to move forward on this.”
Pelosi spokesman Brendan Daly, who said Democrats are busy working out the details of their agenda, could not describe specific bills.
“We will have hearings and we will have legislation on Iraq” in the first two weeks of September, Daly said.
For months, Democrats have pointed to September as the time when they would step up their efforts to try to pull the plug on funding for the war, in part because war-weary Republicans have given Bush the same deadline for showing some success in restoring order in the country.
In recent days, however, a few Democrats have indicated they believe the troop surge is working and have questioned forcing a hasty withdrawal.
But that trickle of support has apparently done nothing to slow the tidal wave of opposition to the war among most House Democrats, who believe that military progress has been mixed at best and who point out that the Iraqi government has missed most of the political and economic benchmarks set by the Bush administration.
House Republicans charge that the Democrats are more concerned with domestic politics than with the situation on the ground in Iraq.
“The extent to which Democratic leaders are beholden to the extreme left is positively breathtaking,” said Kevin Smith, spokesman for House Minority Leader John Boehner, R-Ohio.
In addition to Iraq legislation, House Democrats in September will introduce a bill reforming the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, parts of which Pelosi and others in her party consider an “unacceptable” infringement of civil liberties. Just before the House recessed for August, it approved a temporary bill at the behest of President Bush that granted the administration wide-ranging eavesdropping powers.
