If at First You don't Succeed

Saturday was a bleak day for the Senate Democrats. While the House had no trouble passing their non-binding resolution opposing Bush's current plan for Iraq (246-182), a special Saturday session of the Senate convened to vote on whether or not such a resolution should even be debated. (Is this how we are teaching all those other countries around the world about the benefits of democracy?) Sixty votes were needed to debate the resolution; but, even with the assistance of seven Republicans (time for a new edition of Profiles in Courage?), only 56 votes could be mustered.

Fortunately, the abuses that the Senate Democrats suffered when they were in the minority have taught them not to give up in the face of adversity. According to the Al Jazeera English wire sources, party leaders are already at work on a Plan B. According to Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, the current candidate for best approach is "a proposal that would revoke the October 2002 authorisation that allowed Bush to invade Iraq." This could be a good move, particularly since it moves the debate away from the symbolism of a non-binding resolution and into the heart of the fundamental Constitutional principle of Separation of Powers. In the simplest of terms, what a Congress dominated by White House ideology could grant to the White House can be taken away by a subsequent Congress with a different world-view. Levin was also quoted as saying that revoking the authorization granted to the President would not entail withdrawing support for troops currently in harm's way:

Levin said the Iraq war resolution approved by the Senate more than four years ago "was a wide open authorisation which allowed him [Bush] to do just about anything and put us now deep into combat in Iraq, and now into the neighborhoods of Baghdad.

"I think we'll be looking at a modification of that authorisation in order to limit the mission of American troops to a support mission instead of a combat mission, and that is very different from cutting off funds," he said.

What we have, then, is a Senate that is determined to do the people's business, in spite of any political impediments imposed by the remaining ideologues; and this is far more important than (choose your favorite metaphor) crying over spilled milk or licking your wounds!