Democrats seek to avoid Iraq funding vote this fall
By ANDREW TAYLOR

WASHINGTON (AP) — Democrats in Congress, seeking to avoid a vote on funding the Iraq war during the fall campaign season, are considering combining President Bush's two pending requests into a single bill to be voted on this spring.

House Democratic aides said Thursday that Bush's $108 billion request to finance military and diplomatic operations in Iraq and Afghanistan through Sept. 30, the end of the 2008 budget year, may be combined with his $70 billion request to continue the war into the next president's term.

"You vote one time and get the money out of the way," said Rep. John Murtha, D-Pa., chairman of the House panel responsible for the Pentagon budget. He cautioned that House leaders have not officially endorsed the idea.

But votes on war spending bills inevitably generate tension among Democrats and unhappiness among their core supporters, who are strongly opposed to providing money for the war. That has leaders such as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., hoping to avoid a second vote in the fall.

Democrats are struggling behind the scenes to coordinate strategy for passing the war funding bill, a task made more difficult by a recent Bush threat to veto any domestic add-ons to the war spending measure that would raise its price tag above his request.

Pelosi spokesman Nadeam Elshami cautioned that Democrats have yet to unite behind a strategy on how to tackle their nettlesome Iraq funding problem and that it's not certain the strategy for a combined funding will get the green light.

Democrats are poised to defy the veto threat by adding to the Iraq funding bill a measure to significantly expand education benefits for veterans.

The new GI bill, sponsored by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., would greatly increase college education benefits for veterans to cover tuition and fees at most public universities. That would, on average, double college aid for veterans to about $12,000 per year at a cost of up to $4 billion a year under preliminary Congressional Budget Office estimates.

The additional money for college aid for veterans has bipartisan support and could be difficult for Bush to stop in an election year.

But there's little agreement among Democrats on what other items unrelated to Iraq and Afghanistan to try to add to the war funding bill. Senate Democrats are considering up to $10 billion simply for infrastructure projects such as roads, bridge repairs and school construction.

At an Appropriations Committee hearing Wednesday, Democratic senators pressed a multitude of other ideas: crime-fighting grants; overseas food aid; heating subsidies; funding to combat western wildfires; and heating subsidies for the poor to name just a few.

The war supplemental appropriations bill is one of the few must-pass legislative vehicle to leave the stati on this year. That has lawmakers in both parties eying it as an engine to tug funding for their pet programs into law. Republicans were disappointed that Bush accepted about $17 billion in add-ons to last year's war funding bill and the White House is determined to avoid a repeat.

Meanwhile, Democrats are poised to clip almost $10 billion worth of savings from Bush's war funding request and shift the money to other purposes, including long-term purchases of next generation F-22 fighter planes, 15 C-17 cargo planes and 10 C-130 cargo planes. Another $3.5 billion would be diverted to pay for higher fuel costs.

The savings to pay for the military add-ons would come from a lower estimate for operations costs, reducing purchases of light trucks for the Army, and purchases of fewer combat radios, according to documents the Pentagon gave to lawmakers.

Defense appropriations chair doesn't need full committee markup on war funds
By Megan Scully and Humberto Sanchez
CongressDaily
April 18, 2008

House Defense Appropriations Subcommittee Chairman John Murtha, D-Pa., expressed no public objection Thursday to the possibility that Democratic leaders may skip a full committee markup of the pending war-related supplemental spending bill and send it directly to the floor for debate.

"It doesn't matter to me," said Murtha, who customarily presents the chairman's mark for any defense-related spending bill to the full committee. Any decision on the handling of the supplemental will be made directly by leadership, he added.

Democrats were planning to mark up the bill next week, with floor debate on the spending measure expected this month or in early May. Democratic Caucus sources said Thursday that leaders are considering sending the supplemental straight to the House floor.

Doing so would speed up the chamber's consideration of a massive war-funding package that could include $108 billion for fiscal 2008 and another $70 billion for the first several months of fiscal 2009, as well as money for domestic programs. Skipping a committee markup could limit opportunities to load the bill with amendments.

House Minority Whip Roy Blunt, R-Mo., criticized any effort to bypass the appropriations panel, insisting Democrats should "use the committee process" for the supplemental.

As House Democrats continued to weigh their strategy for the supplemental, Murtha said Congress must complete work on the bill by June 15 to keep money flowing for operations in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"It has to be done," he said.

Pentagon leaders, who have grown increasingly impatient with Congress' slow action on war funding, have warned they need the supplemental to pay soldiers and cover wartime costs past June. Defense Secretary Robert Gates said last week that he would like to see the money in May, saying continued delay threatens payment for some defense contracts, depot maintenance and repair work, and possibly family housing and other military construction.

Murtha said combining the pending fiscal 2008 supplemental with the emergency funding for the first several months of fiscal 2009 has some merit and would provide enough money for U.S. combat operations well into the next administration.

"You vote one time," Murtha said. "You get the money out of the way."

Blunt said the $70 billion to cover war-related costs for fiscal 2009 would not stretch as far as Democrats contended. He questioned whether taking up that funding indicates that little legislative work will be done this fall.

"I think that the additional level of spending is very much in line with their intended goals not to be here in November and December," he said. "This level of spending will take us through the election but it doesn't take us very far into next year."

Blunt said that making an fiscal 2009 down payment for the wars would not persuade Republicans to back any domestic spending Democrats might attach to the bill. President Bush has said he will not accept a supplemental with any provisions that aren't related to the war.

"It will not serve the purpose -- as far as the Republicans are concerned, or the White House is concerned -- of becoming a vehicle ... for spending that, even if appropriate, can certainly be done through the regular appropriations process," Blunt said.

Also Thursday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., said Iraq must take over responsibility for its internal security. She sought to tie that issue to the coming war funding bill by arguing this must be made clear to the Iraqi government in the spending bill.

But with the specifics of the supplemental uncertain and the Bush administration adamantly opposed to the inclusion of policy directives in the bill, she appeared to tacitly acknowledge that she may have to seek another vehicle for that message.

"And that's why the message in a supplemental or something else about [U.S. troop] redeployment is essential to this, or else they [the Iraqis] will never move. And they haven't," Pelosi said.

War Funding Bill Will Put Pelosi's Strength to the Test
By Jonathan Weisman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 20, 2008; A10

By month's end, House Democrats plan to produce a major supplemental spending bill -- totaling as much as $170 billion -- to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan into the next presidency, channel more federal money to the ailing domestic economy and set policies that they hope will begin to move U.S. troops out of the Middle East.

"I think it's important for the government of Iraq to know that they're going to have to take responsibility for the security of their own country, and soon," Pelosi said. "And that's why the message in a supplemental or something else about redeployment is essential to this, or else they will never move."

Democratic leaders have repeatedly said that, in the end, U.S. troops in the field will be funded. But expectations are high that finally Congress will be able to extract a significant policy concession for that money.

Win Without War, a coalition of 42 groups, is circulating a letter declaring that "it is past time to bring the Iraq war to an end" and that "the best course of action in the upcoming defense supplemental appropriations bill is to provide funding only for the safe and timely redeployment of U.S. troops out of Iraq."

Antiwar Democrats are girding for a two-front battle. First, they want to beat back efforts to add popular domestic spending to any war funding, which would bolster support for the underlying bill. Then they want to stop any funding for the continuation of combat in Iraq.

"We have two examples of what can happen when the caucus is unified enough to say no," said Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.), a founder of the Out of Iraq Caucus.

Democrats -- and many Republicans -- have made clear in recent days that Bush cannot expect to get what he has demanded: a $108 billion war funding bill that hews to the letter of his request -- no added domestic spending, no curtailment of his war-making authority.

Members of both parties in the House and Senate introduced legislation this week to give Iraq additional reconstruction aid in loans, not grants, and to force an Iraqi government flush with petrodollars to assume more of the cost of training and equipping its own forces.

"The time has come to end this blank-check policy and require the Iraqis to invest in their own future," Sens. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.), Susan Collins (R-Maine) and Ben Nelson (D-Neb.) wrote Thursday in a letter to Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Senate leaders.

At a contentious Senate hearing Wednesday, White House budget director Jim Nussle warned that Bush "will veto any attempt to hijack this much-needed troop funding bill" with domestic spending.

To that, incredulous senators from both parties had a similar response: Tough.

"I will recommend adding significant funds for infrastructure to create jobs in the short term and promote a growing economy in the long term," said Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.), chairman of the Appropriations Committee.

House leadership is likely to prohibit permanent military bases in Iraq, torture by any government agency, and the deployment of troops into combat before they have rested at least as long as their previous combat tour. Senate Democrats will try to add billions of dollars of education benefits for returning troops.

But Pelosi aides and allies have been quick to say that antiwar activists should not believe that because of the two earlier victories, Pelosi will stop a vote on war funding.

"It's an entirely different issue," Miller said.

Republicans relish yet another instance of Democrats trying and failing to affect war policy, only to end up fighting bitterly among themselves.

"The war spending bill will go just exactly the way they have gone before," Blunt predicted. "The Democrats will fund the troops. We're not going to do any additional spending as long as the president holds the line, and they will be right back where they were."

Spending Add-ons Could Make For Largest War Supplemental Bill Yet
CQ TODAY PRINT EDITION
April 18, 2008 – 7:30 p.m.
By Josh Rogin, CQ Staff

The House version of the latest war supplemental could be the largest war funding bill yet, including added money for military hardware, a second economic stimulus package, veterans' benefits and a bridge fund to carry the war into the next presidency.

The Pentagon is also looking to the supplemental, which the House may mark up as early as this week, to fill gaps in its planning, and it has amended its request to reflect higher fuel prices and the need for more domestic base spending.

But the desire by both Congress and the administration to load supplemental bills with non-war-related expenses has consequences, budget experts contend, because it corrupts the regular budget process and erases the need for disciplined trade-offs of various priorities.

"They have become a crutch that everyone's attaching stuff to," said Gordon Adams, a former budget official in the Clinton administration.

Democrats are expected to tack a $70 billion "bridge fund" for fiscal 2009 onto the $102 billion already requested for the military in fiscal 2008. The fund would allow Congress to avoid another battle over war funding this fall, when the presidential election will be in full swing.

"This will effectively get the issue off the electoral agenda. I think that's the goal," said Adams, now a scholar at the Henry M. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank.

Democrats also plan to attach policy riders to the funding measure, including troop withdrawal timelines, mandates for shorter troop deployments and expanded prohibitions against torture, knowing they lack the votes to overcome a presidential veto.

The House Democratic leadership signaled its intention to roll all outstanding war funding requests into one huge bill last week, after an earlier idea to split the funding into separate portions for Afghanistan and Iraq met with strong criticism.

The White House and its Republican allies have warned that the strategy would not make them more amenable to Democratic plans to add billions for domestic spending to the legislation.

"If Congress wants to include funding for fiscal 2009, we will certainly consider that. However, this should in no way be used as leverage for domestic spending," said Corinne Hirsch, a spokeswoman for the Office of Management and Budget,

President Bush has said he will veto any bill that exceeds his $108.1 billion total request or sets timelines for troop withdrawals.

Domestic Spending

Senate appropriators are considering adding more than $20 billion to the bill for domestic programs. But on the House side, Democratic leaders are taking a more cautious approach.

House Democrats want added domestic funding only for the most urgent needs to prevent Republicans from charging that they are adding "pork" to the bill, a House Democratic aide said.

Leading Republicans have already begun hammering Democrats on that point.

"Republicans want to get our troops the money they need without forcing them to carry unnecessary pork-barrel spending on their backs," said House Minority Leader John A. Boehner, R-Ohio.

House Defense appropriators have said they want to shift between $8 billion and $9 billion in the supplemental away from Iraq toward procurement of more C-17 transport planes, F-22A Raptor fighter jets and C-130 cargo aircraft.

But experts say most of these items would not be delivered for years and so do not merit emergency spending.

The Pentagon is asking for $39.8 billion in procurement funds in the supplemental. Also, in March, the Pentagon sent lawmakers an amended version of its request, which asked for $3.5 billion more than was anticipated to cover the cost of increased fuel prices, and $787 million more for domestic base realignment.

Other Issues Enter the Fray

When the supplemental bill is unveiled, several other issues are expected to become part of the debate, including contentious veterans' benefits legislation, a dispute over a tanker contract, and language to shift more financial responsibility for the war to the Iraqi government.

Some 54 senators have cosponsored a bill (S 22) by Jim Webb, D-Va., that would expand education benefits for active veterans. In the House, 218 members have pledged to support a companion bill (HR 5740) by Harry E. Mitchell, D-Ariz. The bill, which has leadership support for inclusion in the supplemental, is estimated to cost between $2.5 billion and $4 billion annually.

Rep. Ron Klein, D-Fla., has introduced a resolution (H Res 1111) to shift financial responsibility to the Iraqi government for reconstruction and U.S. fuel costs in Iraq. Ben Nelson, D-Neb., is working on a Senate companion measure.

And Rep. Todd Tiahrt, R-Kan., intends to offer an amendment to the supplemental bill to halt a $35 billion Air Force contract for aerial refueling tankers that was awarded to a consortium of Northrup Grumman and EADS, the European-based aerospace giant. The Government Accountability Office is currently reviewing the award.

David Clarke and Matthew Johnson contributed to this story