There’s quite a bit of outrage in the Right Blogosphere about the Senate’s incipient resolution opposing the Bush Administration’s proposed new strategy in Iraq:
Senate Republicans, scrambling to head off GOP defections to a resolution opposing President Bush’s war policy, are considering their own resolution demanding benchmarks to measure progress in Iraq and possibly a new diplomatic effort to end the war, senators said yesterday.
Senators from both parties began preparing for a showdown with President Bush over his plan to increase troop levels in Iraq, although that showdown may be pushed back to the week of Feb. 5. Two rival camps opposed to the additional troop deployments continued to dicker over the wording of a resolution expressing the Senate’s opposition, while GOP leaders and White House loyalists plotted a response.
There’s also an Internet petition going around that Dean Esmay, among others, is asking people to sign onto.
Perhaps it’s because I’m not a Republican or because I’ve never contributed to a Republican politician in my life that I can remember or because Republican office-holders are darned scarce in these parts but I can’t muster much outrage about the Senate resolution or about the likelihood of some Republican Senators supporting it.
Perhaps it’s because I have a defective gallbladder or an over-abundance of phlegm but I can’t muster much outrage about the Senate’s sudden burst of energy at all (or, to be honest, much of anything else for that matter). I’ve already expressed my opinion about Congress’s options for influencing White House actions with respect to the military.
Advice and consent has historically been construed as the Congress (particularly, the Senate) taking the lead on a course of action which the executive branch then follows (Washington thought that the Senate’s role of advice and consent should follow executive action). Has the role ever been construed as solely negative?
I look forward to the Senate’s presumably soon-to-be revealed vision of a way forward in Iraq. Mr. Bush can use all the advice he can get.
Update
James Joyner posts on Congress’s war powers here.
Congress clearly has the power to pass whatever non-binding resolution it wants. I question the wisdom of such a resolution if it accomplishes nothing more than a public gesture of no confidence and makes the plan less likely to succeed. But this would depend on how people in Iraq interpreted the resolution and I find that foreigners don’t often understand the working of someone else’s government (myself included). So one way around this would be for the President to make a show of ignoring the resolution. In other words, if the President believes the plan has a decent chance to work and that an Iraqi perception of constraints on the President is an impediment to the plan, the incentive appears to be for the President to diss the Congress.
I generally agree with what I heard Luger say, there are a lot more constructive things the Senate can do. He usually seems pretty phlegmatic.
I dislike symbolic actions, generally, PD. Too often their exponents persuade themselves that they’re just as good as real actions. And IMO they’re waste motion.
I fear that this symbolic gesture will result in a pattern of recriminations since it is unlikely to ultimately satisfy anbody. The worst outcome would be a constitutional crisis. My views are those in Federalist Paper 70 and think any attempt by the Congress to dictate military tactics is foolish. The Senate can’t come up with an alternate vision because the only concensus available is the sort of lowest-common denominator concensus (we don’t know what we agree to, but most of us agree that we disagree with that). That’s not a bug, it’s a feature of trying to have a representative body. I bet if you put the Biden plan or the Iraqi Study Group plan up for a vote, they would fail.