Senator Jim Webb's (D-VA) amendment, which would require that all soldiers spend at least as much time at home as oversees, is just a few Senators away from reaching the 60 votes of support to force cloture.
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) gave us an earlier today:
“Right now, Senator Webb’s amendment, I would guess, has at least 57votes, on a bipartisan basis,†said Reed on ABC’s This Week with GeorgeStephanopoulos. “We want to move and move forward, pick up thevotes. This process is sometimes too slow, but it’s a process that Ithink is going in the right direction. We’re picking up support. And Ithink on this issue, we can pick up sufficient votes -- 60, I hope 67.â€
I don't know about 67. Maybe 60 or 62. Remember, 60 is required to break a Republican filibuster. 67 is required to override a Bush veto.
More importantly, what this does is turn it into a showdown between George W. Bush and Jim Webb -- exactly what we want. Unlike some other Democrats, Webb is not a wimp. He stands up. He has courage. He is not afraid to give us the hard truth. Voters respect that. He should be out there, front and center, debating Bush, as opposed to Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid.
Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) submitted a bill that would speed up the redeployment of US troops from Iraq by requiring that all soldiers spend at least as much time at home as oversees. Republican presidential candidate John McCain calls the resolution :
"Where in the Constitution of the United States does it say that theCongress decides how long people spend on tours of duty and how longthey would spend back in the United States? It's blatantlyunconstitutional," McCain said.
It is the job of Congress to pass laws. McCain is asking whether Congress has the constitutional right to pass laws that shape the way agencies inside the executive branch are allowed to behave.
Actually, Congress does impact the business within agencies. Read the , which created the Department of Homeland Security. The measure completely laid out the duties in that department, which the Congress has a right to control.
Just ten months into his freshman term as US Senator, Jim Webb has already made a huge splash. Duking it out with Washington establishment heavyweights, this is already the leading voice for the Democrats on foreign policy matters. His new Iraq bill is on the verge of passing, which would counter the claim that Bush is a friend of the military, and significantly reduce the amount of troops on the battlefield.
This is :
Now that President Bush and Gen. David H. Petraeus have charted their course for the Iraqwar, Democrats in the Senate say one of their proposals aimed atshifting the president’s strategy is finally close to winning enoughRepublican support for a real chance at being approved. It wouldrequire that troops spend as much time at home as on their most recenttours overseas before being redeployed.
The proposal, by Senator Jim Webb,Democrat of Virginia, has strong support from top Democrats, who saythat the practical effect would be to add time between deployments andforce General Petraeus to withdraw troops on a substantially swiftertimeline than the one he laid out before Congress this week, and thatit would protect troops from serving protracted and debilitatingdeployments.
If Democrats get the 60 Senators needed to force a cloture vote, this bill will pass. Then it will turn into a one-on-one battle between George W. Bush and Jim Webb, the former NAVY Secretary. Bush and every '08 Republican presidential candidate would have to decide who they are with: the Neocons or the young men and women in uniform and their families.
In the end, Bush will veto the bill, and it will head back to Congress for yet another vote. Two thirds in the House and two-thirds in the Senate (67) must vote yes in order to override the veto. Every GOP Senate candidate in 2008 will be put on notice. It will not pass on the first try. But the anti-Republican backlash among military voters would get the ball rolling, and set the stage for the same measure to pass about one month later.
Jim Webb is exactly the guy Democrats need to have out there front and center debating their side of the coin. Not Harry Reid. Not Dick Durbin. Not Nancy Pelosi. Jim Webb! He has so much credibility on foreign affairs, and the military establishment respects his intentions. Right now, he is more fit than any lawmaker to help us change course in Iraq.
I am not just mentioning this to get you to jump out of your chair and do cartwheels -- although you can at your own risk.
Polls indicate that foreign policy will be the number one issue during the '08 general election. No one other than Wesley Clark has better national security credentials than Jim Webb.
The News Virginian noted this morning why both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are looking at the rookie Senator from Virginia as a possible :
Webb’simage beyond his home state as a no-nonsense ex-Marine and former Navysecretary in the Reagan administration is generating talk about him asa possible running mate for Democratic presidential frontrunnersHillary Clinton and Barack Obama.
“The only [Democratic] candidates with defense credence are Webb and Wesley Clark,’’ Roberts said.
Lessthan a year after toppling Republican incumbent George Allen, Webb hasemerged as one of the Democratic Party’s strongest voices on themilitary and national defense. He delivered the party’s nationallytelevised response to President Bush’s State of the Union speech inJanuary and last month made the national television rounds pushing fortroop withdrawal from Iraq.
Some observersview Webb’s military experience and credibility with voters as a potentcomplement to either Clinton or Obama, both of whom are tasked withselling Americans that they’ll be tough on terrorism.
If it was Obama-Webb '08, that may be the most populist presidential ticket in our country's history. In the race for president, Barack Obama has from currently registered federal lobbyists. Jim Webb, who was elected to his first term last November, raised 90% of his money from . Only 6% came from PAC groups. By Senate campaign standards, that is almost unheard of.
Wouldn't that be something? Two rookie Senators telling the establishment, "To heck with you guys, we're starting a new chapter."
Here is some Webb video:
Webb on Meet the Press discusses economic disparity in America (11/06)
Webb giving Democratic State of the Union Address. Very presidential! (01/07)
Webb debates Lindsey Graham on Meet the Press (07/07)
Nine freshmen Senators are launching an independent commission that will investigate wartime contracting abuses. Congressional sources tell The Blue State that this bipartisan commission will be announced tomorrow during a press conference at 3 PM ET. What they will do is submit an amendment to a pending defense authorization bill that sets up the independent, bipartisan commission to uncover contracting fraud and offer solutions to prevent future abuse. The amendment would also expand the authority of the , whose job it is to investigate such abuses.
The Senators that came up with this proposal were Jim Webb of Virginia, Claire McCaskill of Missouri, Jon Tester of Montana, Ben Cardin of Maryland, Bernie Sanders of Vermont, Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, Sherrod Brown of Ohio, Bob Casey of Pennsylvania, and Sheldon Whitehouse of Rhode Island.
Bob Corker (R-TN), the only freshman Republican Senator, chose not to take part in this effort.
I know it can be frustrating to see the Democrats not do more tochallenge the Bush Administration on Iraq -- almost as if the 2006election didn't mean anything. Actually, the election was importantbecause we brought in a class of freshman Senators whose campaigncontributors included people like you and me. They are less indebtedto the special interest than they are to those who got them into power -- us! Whenever that happens, you see efforts like this to push back against the establishment.
This is exactly why bloggers like myself were pushing so hard to elect Jim Webb (D-VA) last November. Webb speaks out on principle, not political calculation. What he said on Meet the Press today echoes what are saying about this war.
When Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) floated White House talking points about Iraq, Jim Webb shut him down cold. This was priceless! It gets better as the video goes on:
WEBB: This is one thing I really take objection to, is politicians --
GRAHAM: The soldiers are speaking, my friend. Let them win.
WEBB: May I speak? Is politicians who try to put their political views into the mouths of soldiers.
Maybe each of the '08 front-runners ought to consider Senator Webb as a potential running-mate. He is definitely my favorite Senator, that's for sure!
With the war in Iraq stretching our military beyond a breaking point, Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) pressed hard to pass legislation that would have given our troops more time in between deployments. The bill simply stated that the amount of time a soldier spends overseas should be no greater than the time spent on the home front.
Republicans the bill. They were joined by Senator Lieberman (I-CT). Webb and Hagel came up just four votes shy of the 60 votes needed. Senator Webb's office sent a letter out to a group of selected blogs, including The Blue State, outlining the Senator's frustration:
A Republican filibuster kept this amendment from passing by anup-or-down vote. Americans are tired of this kind of posturing. The troops andtheir families don’t want to hear about political, procedural maneuvers.What they really care about are results. They are looking for concrete actionsthat will protect the well-being of our men and women in uniform.
The question onthis amendment is not whether you support this war or whether you do not. It is not whether you want to wait until July or September to see where oneparticular set of bench marks or summaries might be taking us. Thequestion is this: more than four years into ground operations in Iraq,we owe stability, and a reasonable cycle of deployment, to the men and womenwho are carrying our nation’s burden. That is the question. And that was the purpose of this amendment.
The former Republican majority spent five years complaining about the Democrats' repeated filibustering of President Bush's judicial nominees. Now in the minority, the GOP just filibustered a bill that improves the lives of our troops. For some reason, when people like Max Cleland vote against , they get labeled as unpatriotic. But when the majority of Republicans destroy a bill intended to help our troops, it is considered pro-victory.
I have a few more things than usual to get done today. But before I close up shop on this site until midnight eastern, last Friday I was watching C-Span, and there was a forum about the future of conservatism. I remember hoping that someone would post a video on Youtube about it.
Well it turns out that we're in luck. Conservative commentator Laura Ingraham was discussing how Jim Webb scares the crap out of every Republican strategist, mainly because he might be the Democrats' best answer when it comes to reaching out to new voters. Watch this:
Last night, for some reason, Rudolph Giuliani seemed more outraged by how Jim Webb spoke about war than by how Bush has conducted it. Giuliani distorted what Webb said during his Democratic Response in order to mirror the GOP talking point that Democrats are defeatist.
Immediately following President Bush's State of the Union Address, Senator Jim Webb (D-VA) gave the Democratic Response. During the tail end of the first-term Senator's speech, he touched on the issue of troop redeployments.
Former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and Fox News' panelist Fred Barnes Webb immediately:
He (Giuliani) also criticized Senator Jim Webb’s Democratic rebuttal,expressing puzzlement at how the Virginia Democrat could call for anIraq plan that was “not a precipitous withdrawal†but that would “inshort order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.â€
The criticism appears to be an emerging Republican critique (FredBarnes, the conservative commentator, made the same point a few minutesearlier) designed to portray the Democrats as lacking a serious planfor Iraq.
Actually, it's not a contradiction on Webb's part -- it is called nuance. Let's look at exactly what :
The majority of the nation no longer supports the way this war is beingfought; nor does the majority of our military. We need a new direction.Not one step back from the war against international terrorism. Not aprecipitous withdrawal that ignores the possibility of further chaos.But an immediate shift toward strong regionally based diplomacy, apolicy that takes our soldiers off the streets of Iraq's cities, and aformula that will in short order allow our combat forces to leave Iraq.
Translation: Webb wants our soldiers, such as his son, off the urban streets. If that is too difficult to understand, then think of it this way: Webb doesn't want our soldiers standing in the middle of a civil war. If we can get our troops out of the cities, then it will be "a formula" that will allow them to eventually leave Iraq. No, Webb is not saying leave Iraq this second. Getting us out of the urban areas and forcing the Iraqis themselves to step up the effort would lessen the amount of time our young men and women would have to stay in that country. Lastly, the phrase "short order" in this context refers to his party's strategy that he thinks would quicken the eventual exit of troops from Iraq, which a majority of lawmakers on Capitol Hill and the public want.
In politics, nuance often gives commentators and political opposition the chance to take rhetoric out of context, similar to what happened to John Kerry in 2004. So, Webb and his fellow Democrats had a choice: offer dumbed down rhetoric that a preschooler and a few Republicans could understand, or speak to the public like they are adults by giving them an honest and, yes, nuanced assessment of our current war policy. Webb chose the latter.
Just in case you missed it, here is a video of the Democratic Response to the President's State of the Union Address. This is Senator Jim Webb (D-VA), who narrowly defeated George Allen and helped the Democrats take narrow control of the Senate.
This was a very well-written speech. Such as the part on the economy:
"When I graduated from college, the average corporate CEO made 20-times what the average worker did. Today, it is nearly 400-times. In other words, it takes the average worker more than a year to make the amount of money that his or her boss makes in one day."
Or on energy:
"This is the seventh time that the President has mentioned energy independence in his State of the Union message. But for the first time, this exchange is taking place in a Congress led by the Democratic Party."
Or on leadership:
"If he (Bush) does (take action), we will join him. If he does not, we will be showing him the way."
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