Harold Meyerson, in an op ed piece in today’s Washington Post, articulates what I think may be a necessary corrective to the view I expressed here yesterday. In defending Representatives Pelosi and Obey and the supplemental appropriations bill now being thrashed out in the House, Meyerson argues that the amendments proposed by Pelosi, Obey, and others constitute just the kind of oversight that the election of 2006 requires of the new congress. Here is what Meyerson says. in part:

What Pelosi and Obey understand that their critics on the left seem to ignore is that it will take numerous congressional votes and multiple confrontations with Bush to build the support required to end U.S. involvement. Thanks to the Constitution’s division of powers, Congress and the White House seem bound for months of fighting over the conditions attached to any approval of funds for continuing our operations in Iraq. Over time, as the war drags on, either enough Republicans will join their Democratic colleagues to put an end to U.S. intervention, or they will stick with Bush, thereby ensuring there will be a sufficient number of Democrats in the next Congress to end the war.

As a strategy for ending the war, that may not be a thing of beauty. It is, however, the best that our political and constitutional realities allow.

There are those, of course, who object to Pelosi’s even having a strategy to end the war. The lead editorial in yesterday’s Post, for example, took Pelosi to task as playing politics with the war by attempting to craft legislation that could actually win votes from all wings of her party. “The only constituency” that “Pelosi ignored in her plan,” The Post complained, “are the people of the country that U.S. troops are fighting to stabilize.” Rather than heeding the needs of Iraqis, Pelosi is concentrating on the 2008 elections, The Post concluded.

My paper, I fear, is off by two years. If the United States is still in Iraq come November 2008, the Democrats will sweep to power. It’s the 2006 elections that are to blame for this nefarious Democratic plan to wind down the war, for the Democrats ran on precisely that platform, and, more to the point, they won on it. The only constituency that The Post ignored in its assessment of Pelosi’s plan, and the chief constituency she is trying to heed, is the American people. They have charged the Pelosis and Obeys with the messy task of ending this fiasco, which, to their credit, is exactly what Pelosi and Obey are trying to do.

I think Meyerson and the editorial writers from his paper are closer to agreement than appears on the surface. If I had a vote in the congress, I think I would vote with Pelosi and Obey.

I should probably say too, in light of what I said yesterday about argument, that I think argument is good. And in that regard it was refreshing to read Walter Dellinger and Christopher Schroeder’s op ed piece in this morning’s New York Times. after reviewing a number of ‘debate stopping tactics’ currently being used by the administration and its supporters in congress, Dellinger and Schroeder conclude as follows about the debate at large.

One final debate-stifling claim deserves mention: the argument that even to debate our troops’ mission in Iraq somehow undercuts and endangers them. Surely this has it backward. Four years have passed since the Iraq war resolution was passed, in very different circumstances for purposes no longer relevant. We certainly owe those who put their lives on the line every day a renewed determination of whether their continued sacrifice is necessary for the national interest. 

Hoorah!