Congress has the power to bring all troops, mercenaries, and contractors home safely this year. The cost of bringing them home is minimal and already covered by funds appropriated for wars and for a military budget that eats up over half of every tax dollar. We cannot afford another year of damaged world relations, of dead bodies, and of enormous financial expense. Representatives can commit to voting No on any appropriations bill that would give another dime to the occupation of Iraq, and can demonstrate their seriousness by voting No even on bringing such bills up for a vote. Senators can and must commit to filibustering the same type of bills. It takes 41 senators or 51% of representatives to apply a tourniquet to this disaster, stop the bleeding, and bring our men and women home. There could be no better economic stimulus plan than investing all the money we're wasting in Iraq in the U.S. economy.
The above approach is controversial within the U.S. peace movement. It is a more difficult approach than some to get off the ground. It does not have the support of many in Congress. In particular, not one single senator has yet stepped out in favor of a filibuster. But, even while conceding that this approach is more difficult to get started, it is possible to make a strong case that it is the most likely approach to, in the end, actually succeed. We could much more easily get 10 or 20 congress members to start promoting a bill. But getting that bill through the Senate and past a veto will be much harder than succeeding with the approach described above. So, we have to ask ourselves whether our goal is to start something that's doomed to fail, or to try to start something that may get nowhere but is still more likely to succeed, and also more likely to build toward success in future years.
The approach I'm suggesting has the following advantages over
promoting a bill or leaving Congress alone for a year and just focusing
on elections:
1. It's simple and clear and consistent, making it
easier to communicate and generate activism around. It does not involve
a muddled message, as does, for example, supporting an amendment but
opposing the bill it amends. With this approach we are quite simply for
bringing the troops home now. And the same message will stay our
message for months or years until it succeeds.
2. It's more
likely to succeed than the other approaches. It requires fewer Congress
Members and does not require the president's help at all. And it is
made more appealing as the economic recession worsens.
3. If it
succeeds, it will make further funding of the occupations illegal and
obviously impeachable, and if impeachment fails, at least the next
president will have to end the illegal funding or face impeachment on
day 1. (It is not clear that a bill to ban the occupation even while
funding it would have the same result, even if miraculously signed into
law.)
4. It educates citizens about the proper role of the legislative branch of our government.
5.
It energizes people by informing them that Congress CAN end the
occupation, and by trying something new that hasn't already been tried
and failed. That increased energy makes success more likely.
6.
It puts pressure on presidential candidates to take clear-cut
positions. And once they've taken the right position, they will do
everything in their considerable power to make it succeed.
7.If it fails, it builds the understanding and the movement to make it work next year, regardless of how the elections go.
Here's a group that's onto the right approach: http://filibusterforpeace.org
This
approach should inform the actions being planned for peace movement
activism in March 2008, marking five years of occupying Iraq:
http://resistinmarch.org
Of course, we should also continue to
work on public education, and on counter recruitment. We should back
congressional and presidential candidates who most closely approach our
positions. At the presidential level that means, in descending order:
Kucinich, Edwards, and Obama. (Make your own judgments regarding
viability, spoiling, and symbolic delegate elections after the nominee
is known). We should redouble our efforts to open impeachment hearings
for Cheney and Bush, in order to discourage new wars, in order to set a
precedent, and because Bush and Cheney will not end any occupations in
2008 if they are in office, no matter what Congress does. But we must
also lobby Congress to end the legal funding of the occupations in 2008.
There
are voices urging us to allow Congress to do nothing for another full
year, and to focus on trying to elect veto-proof super-majorities of
Democrats in both houses for 2009. Such a stance is admirable for its
recognition that the president in 2009 may be a Republican. But it's
unwise, I think, in two regards. First, it's very likely to fail, and
if it fails it will leave behind nothing but despair, nothing built,
nothing advanced, nothing but another two years of telling us to allow
Congress to do nothing until the NEXT election. (If you don't believe
me, go back and look at what the same people were arguing for early in
2006.) And every two years of failure to act will not just mean the
waste of lives and treasure; it will also make it less likely for the
strategy to work over time. Voters don't usually reward inaction.
Of
course, the approach will fail even with sufficient Democrats in
Congress if the president is a Democrat, because in that case the
Congress will likely not override a veto. The veto-override strategy
only works if you're pushing for a Republican president and Democratic
Congress or vice versa, but everyone promoting it is pushing for
Democratic wins in both branches.
Secondly, this approach does a
grave disservice to citizens of this country by giving them the false
impression that Congress has to pass a bill in order to end an
occupation, whereas Congress has a much easier approach available to
it, one that it could use this year or build the momentum this year to
use next year regardless of electoral outcomes.
Other voices are
urging us to encourage members of the House to pass a bill requiring an
end to the occupation, but failing to use the power of the purse to
impose it. And most of the voices urging this approach have as their
ideal outcome a failed vote to pass the bill, but a narrower failure
than similar bills have seen in the past. Such a bill, if it passes the
House (which even its advocates predict will not happen) is expected to
die in the Senate. If it passes the Senate, it is expected to be
vetoed. This would take us the long way, at great expense and energy
loss, to an argument for electing veto-proof Democratic majorities.
Most
of these same voices urge us to encourage House members to introduce
the same sort of language as an amendment to a bill to fund the
occupations. If such an amendment were to pass, we'd be in the same
position described above of facing failure in the Senate or White
House. If such an amendment were to fail, as is more likely, we'd be
hard pressed to quickly tell everyone to urge their representatives to
vote NO on the larger bill. We know this because we took this approach
of tying one hand behind our back in 2007. It made us look like idiots,
but not nearly as much as doing it AGAIN will.
And if we reach
the point of having an anti-occupation bill blocked in the Senate or
White House, what will Congress do? We won't have been hammering it
with the message of blocking bills and moving forward without bills.
Its only possible response to a blocked bill will be to pass the sort
of bill that won't be blocked. We know this because we went through the
same sequence in 2007. It made us look like idiots, but...(you fill in
the rest).
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