Having failed to override president Bush's veto on a war funding bill that included firm pullout dates, Senator Hillary Clinton (d-NY) and ex-Klan Kleagle Robert Byrd (d-WV) have a new strategy: they will seek a vote to rescind the authority Congress granted Bush to use force in Iraq in October 2002.
"We're going to force a debate on the whole war," she told reporters outside the Senate chamber. "We want to force the Congress to look at whether the president's authority, which comes from Congress, should be rescinded."
Senator Clinton made a point of saying that she supported a resolution Byrd offered to the war-authorization resolution that would have required the president to return to Congress every year for renewal of his war powers.
From the standpoint of the Democrats in congress, it's a win-win, of course. The whole object of submitting a ridiculous bill to the president that he was certain to veto was to obscure the fact that the Democrats likewise voted to authorize President Bush to go into Iraq and to turn Iraq, as Senate Majority leader Harry Reid said into 'Bush's War' for partisan political purposes.
Senator Clinton's and Senator Byrd's gambit just makes it that much clearer.
Senator Clinton, of course, gets the added benefit of pandering to the Angry Left wing of the Democratic party at a time when Barack Obama has cut substantially into her lead in the polls as the Democrat front runner, and of making a decent attempt to forestall any efforts by ex-senator John Edwards to gain ground with the Angry Left constituency at Obama and Clinton's expense should they be forced to vote for a compromise with the White House on the war funding bill.
The fact that these measures are a perversion of the Constitution and the separation of powers is, of course, secondary to these people.
Enough said, and a good thing to remember as you watch things unfold over the next year and a half until the elections.
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