As Democrats struggle this week to come up with an anti-war bill that can attract enough Republican support to win Senate approval, their counterparts in the House are in no rush to work out a compromise.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi wants to avoid provoking another kind of war — within the deeply divided Democratic caucus, which includes a staunch anti-war faction and a more conservative group of moderates, leadership aides said Thursday.
The aides point out that the House already passed anti-war legislation earlier this year, including a bill that sets a firm timetable for withdrawing troops and another expanding the amount of rest troops should get between deployments.
Even if the Senate is able to pass a bill, there is no guarantee the House will take it up.
“It depends what’s in it,” a leadership aide said. “It would need some type of timeline in it at least.”
The Senate is weighing a timetable, but it would only set a goal for withdrawing the troops, not a firm deadline.
That won’t be enough for many House Democrats, including Rep. Jim McDermott, D-Wash.
“It might be brought up for a vote on the House, but it won’t have the majority of Democrats supporting it,” McDermott said. “It’s pretty clear there is a belief on our side that there should be a timeline of some sort that is a hard timeline. Any kind of mush is just eyewash to give some people some cover.”
The House efforts in recent months to pass Iraq legislation have nearly splintered the Democratic caucusover the issue of firm withdrawal timelines.
“It becomes kind of cumbersome after a while,” said Cole Perryman, spokesman for Oklahoma Democrat and moderate Dan Boren, who opposes timelines. “We are at a stalemate.”
Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., “are working closely on how to proceed,” said Reid’s spokesman Jim Manley.
House Democratic leaders are not ruling out the possibility of taking up the Senate’s weaker timeline approach, according to leadership aides.
“We will see what the Senate can pass,” a Democratic leadership aide said.
Language could be added to a House bill that would require Bush to provide a written plan for troop redeployment within 60 days.
