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:
My colleague Mike Goldfarb commented yesterday that it’s a mistake to assume that a Democratic president will follow the same course as a Republican president in Iraq. That’s obviously true. Even as there is a broad national consensus that we have turned the corner in Iraq and are headed in the right direction, Democratic leaders refuse to fund the war in Iraq past the next few months. And is this an aberration? Not remotely. Democrats may be refusing to fund the war because they don’t like it, but Harry Reid is simultaneously declaring his refusal fund the rest of the government because of politics:
Is there anything that Harry Reid doesn’t want to defer until there’s a president he agrees with?
