So we blink, take a breath, stare once more at the vote total: 149 nay, 141 yea. War funding request denied!
This is a first, fleeting and fluky though it may be. Look quickly and imagine a Congress that doesn’t feed the war god every time it pounds the table. Look quickly and imagine what courage can accomplish. We can breach the fortress of special interests that is our government and let historic change flow in.
Well, maybe. This isn’t the time to get carried away. If the “victory” for peace last week in the U.S. House of Representatives turns out to have historic significance, it will be because history has a sense of humor.
I say this not to denigrate the passionate effort that peace-minded citizens put into it; their lobbying and calls to power have created a constituency that 147 Democrats and two Republicans were unable to ignore.
As David Swanson of AfterDowningStreet.org, one of the groups that regularly pushes Congress to have a conscience, observed, “It used to be five or 10” no votes on war-funding bills. Last week’s vote, no matter how provisional, “is still a huge victory because those 147 Democrats have been afraid for years that if they did this the media would denounce them, the sky would fall.”
So noted. The
pressure works, folks. The peace we feel in our hearts doesn’t have to stay there. It can cross the Potomac.
Of course, when it does, it will turn into politics. Hang onto your hats. In the corridors of power, ideals are flattened out, cauterized with cynicism and ground into sausage — I mean legislation.
Witness what went down last week in the House, and why the god of war is unlikely to go hungry despite his little setback. The Democratic leadership, seemingly trying to please every constituency under the sun, grafted a triad of amendments, including one that would appropriate $165 billion for the Iraq/Afghanistan war efforts — the final war-funding request of the Bush presidency — onto a “phantom” bill that had already passed last fall. There were votes on each amendment, but none on the nonexistent “bill” itself.
The other two amendments, both of which passed, were: A) a set of provisions regarding the conduct of the war, including prohibitions on the construction of permanent bases and the use of torture, and a wimpy, nonbinding troop withdrawal deadline of December 2009; and B) a smorgasbord of domestic funding proposals, the most high-profile of which would have made college scholarships available to post-9/11 military veterans.
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