Funding

by digby

John Fund responded to my post of last night by sending an email telling me that he is friends with a black GOP activist named Ted Hayes, who hails from Waters’ district. Good for him.

He also pointed out that Waters was, in fact, one of those who voted on one bill to cut off funds for the war, which means that his taunting had some basis in fact. What he doesn’t explain is why she should be ashamed of it.

This “cutting off funds for the troops” is an old Republican shibboleth going back to Vietnam. They use it very effectively to say that Democrats don’t support the troops, but it’s actually the only method the constitution provides for the congress to force an intransigent president to change course in a war when the people demand it. This is a democracy last I checked and we do have at least a little say in these things.

There are always a few who see the writing on the wall earlier than others. When Johnson wanted to escalate the war in Vietnam some senators famously demured:

Gaylord Nelson … as the junior Senator from Wisconsin in 1965, joined two others in voting against funding to escalate the Vietnam war. At the time Nelson said:

“At a time in history when the Senate should be vindicating its historic reputation as the greatest deliberative body in the world, we are stumbling over each other to see who can say ‘yea’ the quickest and the loudest. I regret it, and I think some day we shall all regret it. . . .

“Reluctantly, I express my opposition . . . here by voting ‘nay.’ The support in the Congress for this measure is clearly overwhelming. Obviously, you need my vote less than I need my conscience.”

As time went on and the war became more and more untenable, more agreed with that argument. And finally, after years of protests and many tens of thousands more dead, a bi-partisan veto-proof majority voted for an amendment which forbade any further U.S. escalation of the war in Vietnam. The next year, after Watergate, a lame duck congress voted to cut off funding.

It’s not as if they were blameless. As Nelson said, in the early days they were “stumbling over each other to see who can say ‘yea’ the quickest and the loudest.” But after years of public debate and outcry, they finally heard what the people were saying and they did what they had to do. Too late, as it turned out, for a lot of people.

Morton Kondracke writes about this topic in this week’s column, bemoaning the fact that a Democratic majority may do the same thing. He believes in the simplistic fairly tale that we would have won Vietnam if it weren’t for the dirty hippies so he finds this a damning propect. But it is only a possibility because of the lies and strategic blunders that got this country into that misbegotten war and the bungling that’s characterized it ever since. At some point you have to do something. And the only thing a congress can do in the face of presidential intransigence and incompetence is deny the president the money to screw things up any further.

President Bush could make it easy on himself and the nation by listening to what the people are telling him, being honest and coming up with the least bad plan out of an array of bad options. But he won’t. He has said that he will not leave Iraq and he’s shown that his administation has no skill to do anything else. Unless he does, there will, by necessity, be more who will be forced to vote against funding, not because they don’t support the troops but because their constituents demand it. It shouldn’t have to come to that.

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