While attention remains on the Senate with Elena Kagan and Wall Street reform, this week the House is fighting over Afghanistan war funding. In a positive move, House Democrats are going to strip $3.9 billion in infrastructure funding in Afghanistan, due to widespread corruption in the government. Ryan Grim:
The House Democrat who oversees funding for Afghanistan's redevelopment and reconstruction said on Monday that she is stripping money from her foreign aid bill in reaction to pervasive corruption. Dave Obey, chairman of the Appropriations Committee, supports the move made by subcommittee chairwoman Nita Lowey (D-N.Y.), according to an Obey spokesman.
Lowey cited pervasive corruption in Afghanistan as the cause for her decision to pull the funding from the appropriations bill working its way through her State and Foreign Operations Appropriations Subcommittee.
"I do not intend to appropriate one more dime for assistance to Afghanistan until I have confidence that U.S. taxpayer money is not being abused to line the pockets of corrupt Afghan government officials, drug lords and terrorists," said Lowey.
A Lowey spokesman said the restrictions would not apply to direct humanitarian assistance for projects such as refugee camps, but would limit funds for USAID and the State Department, which funnel money to reconstruction efforts -- money that is often siphoned many times over.
The request that Lowey is rejecting amounts to $3.9 billion for the 2011 fiscal year.
Good. In addition to the corruption issue, I also like this since Republicans, Blue Dogs and Ben Nelson managed to kill all new stimulus spending in the United States. It simply feels stupid that we would be funneling infrastructure spending to the Afghanistan government while denying it domestically.
Additionally, Speaker Pelosi and President Obama sounded different rhetorical tones on withdrawal from Afghanistan next summer. While both are still talking about starting withdrawal next July, the different way they chose their words is notable.
In some of the strongest terms she has used to date, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi declared last Friday that the United States will see "a serious drawdown" of forces in Afghanistan by July 2011 and that the House may use the power of the purse to ensure the drawdown takes place.
In an exclusive interview with the Huffington Post, Pelosi made clear that while recent talk has hinted that the administration's stated goal of a June 2011 start date for a troop drawdown may be open to change, her commitment to it remains firm.
"I think we'll have a serious drawdown, I don't think it'll be, as [the president] said, turning out the lights," said Pelosi.
"I believe we'll need to provide assistance to Afghanistan for a long time to come," Obama said at a news conference following the conclusion of the G-20 summit. "We do not expect because of our involvement in Afghanistan that the country is going to completely transform itself in a year or two years or five years."
Obama chastised what he dubbed a current "obsession" over a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops. "My focus right now is how do we make sure what we're doing there is successful," he said. "By next year we will begin a transition."
Technically they both mean the same thing: withdrawal will start next year, but we will not pull out completely. However, Pelosi focuses on the drawdown, using the word "serious," while Obama talks of a long-term commitment, and even derides a focus on withdrawal. If you are looking to read the future between the lines, President Obama's language is not very encouraging.
Last night, there was a report that Speaker Pelosi had called an impromptu meeting at 10 a.m. this morning with all women in the Democratic caucus.
Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) is asking all female Democratic Members to attend a hastily called meeting Wednesday morning but isn't saying what the meeting is about.
Pelosi's office sent an e-mail out Tuesday evening requesting that all female Democrats come to the Members-only meeting at 10 a.m.
An aide to one Democratic Member said Pelosi's office said the topic of the meeting was "to be determined."
Lincoln Davis, Jim Matheson, Harry Teague, Travis Childers, John Barrow, Zack Space, Chris Carney, Brad Ellsworth, Jerry Costello, Henry Cuellar, Nick Rahall, Solomon Ortiz, Earl Pomeroy, Bill Foster, Harry Mitchell.
Of this group, only Bill Foster and Harry Mitchell opposed Stupak, and they are probably the easiest votes to get anyway. Given this, was Speaker Pelosi preparing for a final cave to Stupak in order to get the remaining six votes?
Fortunately, the answer is no. An aide to the leadership has confirmed to me that the following Roll Call story about the meeting is accurate. Speaker Pelosi is meeting with everyone, and in the specifici meeting with the women in the Democratic caucus this morning, and reproductive rights were not discussed:
Abortion provisions in the health care bill were not discussed during a hastily called Wednesday morning meeting between Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and female Democratic Members. Instead, Pelosi ran through talking points on how health care reform benefits women, according to lawmakers who attended the meeting.
I was at a retreat over the weekend with musicians and managers of musicians re how to best involve musicians in making social change, and the organizer of the event asked me to do a brief overview of what public policy advocacy actually means, so I drew some lines on four different pieces of posterboard to show people. Given that these simplistic, dumb-looking charts seemed to put advocacy into perspective for folks, and given the intensity of emotion we all feel about what is going on in the health care fight, I thought it would be worth reproducing them for a blog post.
Before I show them to you, I wanted to say a couple of things re this health care fight, and all other policy fights for that matter.
Health care reform was always going to be tough as hell, as difficult as any issue that could ever be tackled. As I learned from the agony of the 1993-94 Clinton attempt at health care reform, this issue is so massive, so complicated, so unwieldy that it is prone to be derailed by lobbyists pulling on any one of the hundred hanging threads and unraveling the whole thing. Culture war issues like abortion and immigration combine with issues peculiar to individual districts like having a medical device manufacturer based in a congressperson's district, and all of those things combine with bigger worries about overall ideological and political concerns back home.
When people over the weekend would ask why getting the votes for the health care bill was so hard, I would have to say: it just is - it is the nature of the beast. Every step along the way will be tough and painful and decidedly not easy. Every time we complete a step, like we did on Saturday night, it is easy to look at how hard it was and say, "Oh my God, the next step is even harder, how we will ever get there?"
Determined leadership can find a way through. In the 1993 budget fight, every step of the way was complete torture, and at numerous times it looked like we were completely done for. But we kept battling, took on one step at a time, and we got it done.
Speaking of determined leadership, Nancy Pelosi deserves enormous credit for finding a way to get this done. Like all progressives, I am deeply unhappy with the abortion language that was allowed to be voted into this bill. That language is unacceptable and has to be changed in conference committee. But I was looking at the vote count on Friday night too, and we really were done unless that vote was allowed. There were literally no good choices at that moment, because to let the bill fail or pull the bill from being voted on would have caused everything to get unraveled. We still have a very good chance at stripping this terribly restrictive anti-abortion language in conference committee, and need to keep fighting to do that.
On the final vote, the whipping process was intense and impressive. Democratic leaders I have known in the past have rarely played this kind of hardball, but some kneecaps were broken Saturday night to get these votes, and the Speaker did a masterful job of doing every little thing that needed to be done. She gave no passes to people, and she was very clear there would have been consequences to all who voted no. She got the job done.
I also wanted to commend the congresspeople from tough districts likely facing very competitive races who did the right thing on this vote. It was a good political move on balance because it will help them turn out the base in the 2010 election, but when you are getting hammered by the big money forces against this bill, it never feels like a tough vote like this is going to help you. As a strong progressive, I give more conservative members of the Democratic caucus a lot of flack sometimes, but these Democrats from tough districts deserve a lot of thanks:
AZ-01 Kirkpatrick, Ann R+6
AZ-05 Mitchell, Harry R+5
AZ-08 Giffords, Gabby R+4
CA-11 McNerney, Jerry R+1
CT-04 Himes, Jim D+5
FL-08 Grayson, Alan R+2
IL-08 Bean, Melissa R+1
IL-11 Halvorson, Debbie R+1
IL-14 Foster, Bill R+1
IN-8 Ellsworth, Brad R+8
KS-03 Moore, Dennis R+3
MI-07 Schauer, Mark R+2
MI-09 Peters, Gary D+2
MN-01 Walz, Tim R+1
NH-01 Shea-Porter, Carol R+0
NV-3 Titus, Dina D+2
NY-01 Bishop, Timothy R+0
NY-19 Hall, John R+3
NY-24 Arcuri, Mike R+2
NY-25 Maffei, Dan D+3
OH-15 Kilroy, Mary D+1
OR-5 Schrader, Kurt D+1
PA-3 Dahlkemper, Kathy R+3
VA-5 Perriello, Tom R+5
WI-08 Kagen, Steve R+2
On the other hand, there are some Democrats I am appalled by. As a 30-year supporter of single-payer, and with full knowledge of the imperfections in this bill, I am angry that single-payer supporters Kucinich and Massa were happy to let any hope of health care reform for a generation die because the bill wasn't everything we hoped it would be. To let another generation go by where tens of thousands of people die every year from being under-insured, and have the insurance companies continue to be allowed to screw people over pre-existing conditions, lifetime caps, and recessions is just wrong.
Then there is the large collection of Blue Dogs who care nothing about the President or the Democratic Party's top priority, let alone all those people without insurance. After all that Rahm Emanuel and Nancy Pelosi did for these reps in the 2006 and 2008 elections, all the money and time and staff and consultant help they gave them, for those Blue Dogs to walk away on the biggest issue, when they were needed the most, is a sign of their selfishness. These are Rahm's people, recruited by him and supported by him at every step of the way, and they don't care that they are making him look terrible by leaving him out to dry. They are also dumb about their own political fate: if Democrats don't deliver, Democratic base voters will walk away in massive numbers, and it will be the people in marginal districts that will suffer the most.
The health care debate was always going to be a knock-down, drag-out fight, with every stage a harrowing journey to get through. But we survived another big step on Saturday night, and are alive to fight for another round. We will figure out how to win this one way or the other, making history when we do.
At the Maria Leavey media breakfast with Speaker Pelosi on Tuesday, Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake raised a really important question with Pelosi, asking her to react to media reports about unnamed White House aides sniping about her. Among other things, these unnamed snipers are complaining about how partisan she is, about unspecified leaks coming out of her office. They have bizarrely said she is "harder to deal with than the Republicans," and, strangest of all, that she passed the President's stimulus bill "too quickly."
It's the old Dick Morris triangulation strategy that the Clinton White House used in the aftermath of the 1994 shellacking of Democrats at the polls. At the time, I disagreed with the strategy (it was one of the reasons I left the White House), and I still believe both that Clinton would have survived without it and that we would have retaken Congress in the 1996 elections as well. But Clinton doing it at a time when the Democratic Congressional approval ratings and the Democratic brand in general was in the dirt was at least understandable. Doing it now- when the Democratic brand is pulverizing the Republican brand, when Obama's approval ratings are so strong, when our next election is the off-year Congressional races, and when we need Democratic unity to pass the most ambitious legislative program in more than four decades- it's insane.
I don't believe this is Obama's idea. What this feels like instead is something else that happened all too often in the Clinton White House: damaging leaks, spun in the most damaging possible way, by disloyal White House staffers pursuing a personal agenda instead of the President's. Why else would you complain about Pelosi fast-tracking the President's own proposal (one he wanted on his desk three weeks after arriving in the Oval Office), or say the Speaker was harder to deal with than Republicans who are strenuously opposing you at every turn? Make no mistake: among the President's senior appointees are some conservative, conventional wisdom Democrats with lots of friends among the special interest lobbyists. I have no doubt that they will pursue their personal agenda even if it hurts their President, and progressives need to call them out on it.
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