A House panel Thursday voted to continue funding the war in Iraq but set a deadline of next year for withdrawing U.S. troops from the four-year-old conflict.
“We are trying to deliver a message to the politicians in Iraq that we are not going to sit around forever watching them dither … while our troops die,” House Appropriations Committee Chairman David Obey, D-Wis., said before the largely party-line vote in his committee.
The 38-28 vote approved more than $100 billion in additional spending for the war and set a Sept. 1, 2008, deadline for pulling troops out of Iraq. Congress also stuffed more than $20 billion in domestic “pork” spending into the “emergency” war-funding bill.
Rep. Barbara Lee, D-Calif., the lone Democrat to vote against the bill, argued that voters last November “sent a mandate to us to bring home our men and women before the end of the year.” No Republicans on the panel supported the plan because they consider the deadline arbitrary and said it signals weakness to the enemy.
Rep. Bill Young, a FloridaRepublican who sits on the committee, said he, too, wants to bring the troops home, but “we can’t afford to turn over Iraq to al-Qaida.”
Rep. John Boehner, the GOP leader from Ohio, said Republicans will “oppose these efforts to hamstring our generals and our troops on the ground in their effort and in their mission of succeeding in Iraq.”
Outside the committee chamber, anti-war protesters who helped surge Democrats into power in the November elections pleaded for party leaders not to continue funding the war.
“If you fund it, you own it,” said protester Liz Hourican, a Phoenix, Ariz., resident. “If you continue this war, blood will be on your hands.”
Hourican and a group of other women from all over the United States pushed grocery carts along the sidewalk outside the Rayburn House Office Building with banners that said, “Don’t Buy Bush’s War” in blood-red ink.
Also included in the “emergency” war-spending proposal were plenty of unrelated goodies for lawmakers’ home districts. There was $74 million for peanut storage in Georgia, $25 million for spinach growers in California and $100 million for citrus growers in Florida.
“A lot of members around here see this as a big green light — this emergency supplemental spending bill — for all kinds of unrelated spending,” Boehner said. “This shouldn’t be a Christmas tree, and we shouldn’t expect to pass these unrelated issues on the backs of our soldiers.”
The committee rejected several amendments offered by Rep. Mark Kirk, R-Ill., to strip out nonessential spending. The only non-war spending cut from the bill Thursday was $16 million for new office space for lawmakers, stripped out at the request of Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa.
