House Looking To Pass Bill Withdrawing Troops
“Today, this Congress faces an historic vote,” said Rep. Rahm Emanuel as he addressed the House on a war spending bill that will require U.S. combat troops to withdraw by the fall of 2008. “It is time, after four years… that we ask the Iraqis to do for Iraq what they have asked us to do for four years, and that is to be accountable for their own future,” said Emanuel.
He rejected the argument that Congress is attempting to “micromanage” the war. “I would say to you, ‘You rubber-stamped four years of mismanagement,”’ he said, calling the GOP’s policy “More troops, more money, more time, more of the same.” Yet the Whte House puches that Democratic leaders in Congress are only jeoparding funding for U.S. troops overseas by adopting a bill that the president will most likely strike down with a veto.
The Senate Appropriations Committee also has approved a spending bill, with an earlier troop withdrawal, which Bush vows to veto. The White House, insisting that any legislation containing a withdrawal date for U.S. troops will be vetoed, warned today that war funding will run out in mid-April if Congress does not pass a bill that the president can accept.
“Congress knows very well,” White House spokesman Tony Snow said today, that “the bill is going to be voted… You’ve got to ask yourself, hy go through this long, drawn-out exercise of trying wheedle and cajole votes within your own party when you know it’s not going go go anywhere.?”
If the supplemental war spending bill is not enacted by April 15, he said, the Pentagon has said that funding will have to be drawn from other areas of the Defense Department to support the troops in Iraq. Congress will be hard-pressed to argue that it supports the troops, he said, if they allow funding to lapse.
“They need to do their job,” he said. That job: Authorizing funding “for the folks who are there.” The president will be pressing the case in his weekly radio address on Saturday.