Washington – The Senate debate on President Bush’s plans for increasing the number of U.S. troops in Iraq was delayed today when negotiations between Democratic and Republican leaders collapsed in a round of insults and finger-pointing.
The Democratic majority in the Senate, in league with some Republicans, had drafted a bipartisan, non-binding resolution of disapproval of President Bush’s plans to boost the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.
But the Senate’s Republican leaders, hoping to spare the White House that embarassment, insisted on votes for their own politically-tailored measures as well, which would discomfort the Democrats.
When Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nevada refused to consent to the Republican tactics, the GOP leaders moved to stall a vote on the bipartisan resolution.
“The Republican side is afraid to debate even a non-binding resolution,” said Sen. Charles Schumer, D-New York. “It is that lack of debate that led us into the situation we are now in…the muddle…the debacle.”
“They should at least have the courage to stand and defend their position,” griped Sen. Richard Durbin, the Democratic whip from Illinois.
But Republican whip Trent Lott of Mississippi suggested that it was the Democrats who were chicken-hearted. If they were so opposed to the president’s plans, Lott said, the Democratic leaders should do something more substantive, like ending funding for the war.
A non-binding resolution is “a lot of sound and fury without any real effect, signifying nothing,” Lott taunted.
As senators from both parties lined up to speak on the war, Lott predicted that the two parties would eventually resolve their procedural differences and begin to debate, perhaps as early as this evening.
“This is all a bunch of show and tell,” he said.
