What do the House and Senate votes tell us?
To help get some perspective on Thursday's vote by the House and Senate to approve funding for the Iraq war, it's helpful to look back to the last time Congress appropriated funds for the war in Iraq.
Eight months ago, in September 2007, Congress voted $70 billion in funding for the Iraq war.
In the House, the vote was 394-22 (roll call)
In the Senate, the vote was 100-0 (roll call)
So, eight months ago, of 535 Senators and Representatives, only 22 were willing to say "no" to war funding. At the time, the conventional wisdom in Washington was that a "no" vote on a war funding bill was "political suicide", that any representative who voted "no" would be subjected to potentially career-ending attacks for "abandoning the troops", and therefore only a few representatives from "safe" districts, the predictably anti-war representatives like Dennis Kucinich or Tammy Baldwin or Lynn Woolsey, could afford to vote "no."
Now the political calculus is very different. This is most evident in the Senate. Of the four Democratic Senators now running for President, three (Clinton, Dodd and Obama) voted "no". Once it was considered a career-ending move to vote against war funding, now it's considered a career-ender (or at least damaging to one's Presidential prospects) to vote for war funding.
The most powerful tool any President has for continuing an unpopular war is the argument that money cannot be cut off once troops are engaged in combat, and that doing so would be "abandoning the troops". Thirty years ago, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon used this argument to keep money flowing to the Vietnam war. Today, George Bush uses this charge as a club to force the Congress to keep the money flowing to the Iraq war, even when it is clear that this war is a tragic waste of lives, is making us less secure, and is destroying the army and bankrupting the country.
But yesterday's vote shows that the "abandoning the troops" club is not as effective as it once was. And that's a sign for hope. We're on our way to persuading a large majority of Americans, not only that this war is wrong, not only that our troops should be brought home now, but that a funding cutoff is an appropriate way - in fact, the only way - to accomplish those goals. If we can do this, we take away from this President, and possibly future Presidents as well, the ability to extort from the Congress funding for a war the public opposes.
So, as disappointed as I am with Thursday's vote, I see some cause for optimism. Let's keep building a powerful movement, not only to end this war, but to limit the ability of all Presidents to engage in endless war.