And the Republicans in the House ask why? The answer is obvious: BDS. The BDS of both the members of the House and of their base. If Clinton was in charge of this war, you wouldn't have any votes in Congress for withdrawal:
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi announced on Thursday that she will bring another troops-out-of-Iraq bill to the House floor on Friday.I wonder when it will dawn on the Democrats that with each vote they look more ineffectual? It won't pass in the Senate and they know that, yet they take the time away from other legislation to pass a meaningless resolution that is purely symbolic. With each vote they look like a child holding his breath because he's mad at his dad. If I were a Democrat in the House I might be tempted to vote down the next resolution so that the leadership would stop offering these bills and would actually get some work done before the Christmas break (how embarrassing would it be for the resolutions to start losing votes -- with the surge working there is a real possibility that some might want to change their vote to be in support of the work the troops are doing).
It will be the 58th "politically motivated" bill on the Iraq war by the House and Senate this year, Republicans complained.
"We are restating the differentiation between us and the president of the United States," Pelosi said at a press conference. "This gives voice to the desires of the American people," she said of the bill, which ties war funding ($50 billion for four months) to an immediate troop withdrawal.
"This is not a blank check for the president," Pelosi said.
House Republican Whip Roy Blunt (Mo.) criticized Democrats for refusing to recognize the important of the U.S. military mission as well as the "tremendous progress we've made against all odds in capturing and killing agents of terror, and providing a level of security for political reconciliation to take place.
"This bill is deja-vu all over again," Blunt said. "The last time Democrats tried to tie funding for our troops to a date for surrender, they failed - and that was before the marked turn-around we've witnessed on the ground over the past several months."
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that American forces have routed Al Qaeda in Iraq from every neighborhood of Baghdad, according to a top American general - "allowing American troops involved in the 'surge' to depart as planned."
The newspaper quoted Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of United States forces in Baghdad, as saying, "there's just no question" that violence had declined since a spike in June.
