Senate Democrats Vow to Confront Bush on Iraq but Are Still Working Out the Details
Senators Kent Conrad of North Dakota, right, the Budget Committee chairman, and Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, the ranking Republican, questioned Defense Department officials at a hearing Thursday.
WASHINGTON, March 1 — Senate Democrats tried Thursday to bridge their political differences over how to confront President Bush on Iraq even as they acknowledged that agreement on an approach remained out of reach.
The Reach of War
Go to Complete Coverage »“We have not gotten our arms around how the caucus is going to move forward,” Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, said as Democrats searched for a plan that would satisfy antiwar lawmakers, keep the party’s centrists on board and win over some Republicans.
The leadership had been preparing to move forward this week with a proposal that would have essentially repealed the 2002 resolution granting Mr. Bush the power to invade Iraq and imposed new restrictions on how American troops could be used there.
But the plan put off some Democrats, because it said explicitly that “the president is authorized to use the armed forces of the United States in Iraq” for the purposes of protecting American forces and bases, training Iraqi soldiers and policemen, conducting operations against terrorists and protecting Iraq’s borders.
Critics of the war, particularly those who opposed the 2002 authorization, worried that this approach would effectively put them on record as sanctioning almost any use Mr. Bush and his commanders might make of the troops, giving Democrats shared responsibility for a war that most of them now oppose and several have rejected all along.
“It’s still George Bush’s war,” said Senator Russell D. Feingold, Democrat of Wisconsin, “but we run the risk of gaining some ownership of it if we don’t make it absolutely clear that we are the party that wants to get out of there.”
Senator Richard J. Durbin of Illinois, the No. 2 Democrat, said he believed that the party’s leaders were close to reaching a new consensus, but he cautioned that any legislation would have to be precisely written.
“I haven’t given up,” he said. “I really think we can carefully word this and come up with strong support in our caucus. But I am one of the 23 who voted against the war, and I want to read this very carefully to make sure I am not authorizing the war at this point.”
Democrats sought to smooth over the problems by drafting another proposal, which began circulating Thursday. That version made it clear that the intent was to narrow the initial authority for the war and placed new emphasis on the phased redeployment of troops. It also put stricter limits on the United States role in protecting Iraq’s borders and said the conflict required a political rather than a military solution.
Mr. Reid said the Democrats were determined to move legislatively on the war after finishing work on a domestic security measure.
Senate Democrats were somewhat defensive about their internal divisions, which have left them open to criticism that unlike the House of Representatives, they have yet to weigh in with a strong vote on the war even though public dissatisfaction with it contributed to their election gains in November.
“We’ve only been in the majority for six weeks,” said Senator Patty Murray of Washington, another member of the leadership, adding that there had been dozens of committee hearings about what to do. “We are working our way for how to do it right,” she said, “and that’s a lot better than we’ve done in the last three to four years.”
Mr. Reid sought to play down any party divisions, saying Democrats were united behind the broad idea that the “war in Iraq is going wrong.” He noted that 49 senators, nearly all of them Democrats, sought unsuccessfully last month to force a vote on a proposal opposing the administration’s troop buildup in Iraq but were thwarted procedurally by Republicans.
Even as the Democrats searched for a policy solution, the political sensitivity over trying to restrict war spending was brought into sharp focus on Thursday.
Senator Kent Conrad, Democrat of North Dakota and chairman of the Budget Committee, raised the idea of cutting $20 billion from the president’s $145 billion request for next year for Iraq and Afghanistan. But he quickly dropped that idea after fellow Democrats insisted on keeping the president’s number in the nonbinding budget framework that is the first step toward bills financing all of the government’s programs, not just the war.
Democrats in the House and the Senate say that even with popular sentiment against the war, trying to agree on how to influence its course is proving much more difficult than some had anticipated.
In the Senate, a working group of nine Democratic senators and their senior aides have been meeting privately throughout the week, trying to resolve their disagreements on how to limit the president’s war authority.
”It’s tricky finding the right formula where you can express the reservations about what’s going on without interrupting legitimate military activities that are being conducted because we’re there,” said Senator Jim Webb, a Virginia Democrat who was elected last fall. “That’s the debate right now.”
Senate Democrats Vow to Confront Bush on Iraq but Are Still Working Out the Details - New York Times
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