House Dems Pull Iraq Occupation Funding Out of Bill, Don't Credit Peace Movement, Blame Bush for Bad Faith in Their Corrupt Deal

UPDATE 3: The other way to stop this is in the House, and the trick is to get David Obey's ego on our side, an effort in which the Republicans are our best ally. If we can just get Obey to rip some Republican's head off screaming that he won't fund any occupation if he doesn't want to, we'll be home free.

UPDATE 2: Even MoveOn.org wants a filibuster!!

UPDATE: The Republicans in the Senate think they have 60 votes for $70 billion, so any Senator who claims to oppose the occupation needs to step up now and filibuster or forever hold their peace.

This gives us some extra days to build pressure against occupation funding:

Associated Press reports: "Meanwhile, Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., vowed again to add $70 billion in Iraq funding to whatever omnibus spending measure reaches the Senate floor before Congress adjourns for Christmas."

Washington Post reported:

The GOP is negotiating in bad faith, Obey says.

A Democratic deal to give President Bush some war funding in exchange for additional domestic spending appeared to collapse last night after House Appropriations Committee Chairman David R. Obey (D-Wis.) accused Republicans of bargaining in bad faith.

Instead, Obey said he will push a huge spending bill that would hew to the president's spending limit by stripping it of all lawmakers' pet projects, as well as most of the Bush administration's top priorities. It would also contain no money for the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"Absent a Republican willingness to sit down and work out a reasonable compromise, I think we ought to end the game and go to the president's numbers," Obey said. "I was willing to listen to the argument that we ought to at least add more for Afghanistan, but when the White House refuses to compromise, when the White House continues to stick it in our eye, I say to hell with it."

House Democratic leaders were scheduled to complete work last night on a $520 billion spending bill that included $11 billion in funding for domestic programs above the president's request, half of what Democrats had initially approved. The bill would have also contained $30 billion for the war in Afghanistan, upon which the Senate would have added billions more for Iraq before final congressional approval.

But a stern veto threat this weekend from White House budget director Jim Nussle put the deal in jeopardy, and Obey said he is prepared for a long standoff with the White House.

"If anybody thinks we can get out of here this week, they're smoking something illegal," he said.

Obey's proposal would ax about 9,500 home-district and home-state projects worth a total of $9.5 billion, according to Keith Ashdown, vice president of Taxpayers for Common Sense, a budget watchdog group. Republicans inserted about 40 percent of those projects. Not all of that money could be eliminated, however. The budget of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers is parceled out as home-district projects, and Congress has no intention of eliminating the Army Corps.

Obey would not specify where the remaining billions would come from to reach Bush's bottom line, beyond saying the money would be shaved from the president's priorities. One possibility would be funding for abstinence education. Other targets could be nuclear weapons research and development in the Energy Department, NASA programs and high-technology border security efforts that have come under criticism for being wasteful and ineffective, said Steve Ellis of Taxpayers for Common Sense.
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Obey's proposal did not move the White House to negotiate, spokesman Tony Fratto said. "Different day, different Democrat, different direction. Our position hasn't changed," Fratto said.

House Republican leaders would be happy to take Obey's offer on spending, GOP aides said yesterday. But rank-and-file lawmakers from both parties could revolt. Home-district projects - known as earmarks - were stripped from the fiscal 2007 spending bills early this year, after Democrats took control of Congress and hastily disposed of budget bills their Republican predecessors had not passed. Earmarks were also eliminated from the 2006 appropriations bill that funded labor, health and education programs, the biggest domestic spending bill of the year.

"There are a lot of people who were very disappointed last year when nobody got any earmarks. If they do it again for the second year in a row, it will be a very bitter pill to swallow," said Rep. Ray LaHood (R-Ill.), an appropriator who complained that he could lose $400,000 he needs for the Abraham Lincoln bicentennial celebration, slated to begin Feb. 12.

LaHood is not the only Republican appropriator who is angry at the White House and at GOP leaders who have refused to negotiate with Democrats on domestic spending levels. In recent days, Rep. David L. Hobson (Ohio), ranking Republican on the Appropriations subcommittee in charge of energy and water projects, had a heated discussion with House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-Ohio), arguing that Boehner should come off his hard line.

Rep. James T. Walsh (N.Y.), another senior Republican appropriator, took to the House floor to argue: "If the proposal is to split the difference, to reduce the amount of spending above the president's request by $11 billion, I would advise the president to take yes for an answer."

But most Republicans are expected to fall in line, as the GOP leadership pushes to regain the mantle of small-government conservatism. Rep. Jack Kingston (R-Ga.), another member of the Appropriations Committee, said Republican lawmakers will face no political jeopardy for not bringing money home for their districts, because they can simply blame Democrats.

"The smartest thing for [House Speaker Nancy] Pelosi to do is to realize the White House always wins these spending contests," he said, advising her to "cut your losses, get out of town and say Bush is still relevant" to the legislative process.

That still leaves the war-funding issue unresolved. Democratic leadership aides on Capitol Hill concede that at some point, Republicans can add some money for Iraq as a stripped-down spending bill winds through Congress. But plans for a quick end to the showdown appear to be fading.

"It is extraordinary that the president would request an 11 percent increase for the Department of Defense, a 12 percent increase for foreign aid, and $195 billion of emergency funding for the war while asserting that a 4.7 percent increase for domestic programs is fiscally irresponsible," Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) said.

________

Bush Adviser Is Seen as Force in Spending Impasse
By Sheryl Gay Stolberg, New York Times

Washington - Ed Gillespie made a name for himself in 1994 as a sharp-tongued pitchman for the Contract With America, the conservative Republican manifesto that catapulted his boss, Dick Armey, to power. But when Republicans shut down the government in a spending clash with President Bill Clinton, Mr. Gillespie warned it was the wrong battle to pick.

"He understands the limits of what you can expect people to buy," Mr. Armey explained.

Now, after a stint as Republican National Committee chairman and a lobbying career that made him a multimillionaire, Mr. Gillespie is back in government as a street fighter and salesman for conservative ideas and the politician behind them - in this case, President Bush. Once again, he is in the thick of a budget fight between the White House and Congress.

But this time, he is driving the confrontation.

As the clock ticks toward a Congressional recess, with Democrats struggling to wrap 11 major spending bills into one and Mr. Bush threatening to veto the huge package, Republicans see the hand of Mr. Gillespie at work. As counselor to the president, a job he took in July, Mr. Gillespie is trying to write a new narrative for Mr. Bush, one that casts him in the role of fiscal conservative, sharpening the contrast between him and Democrats while repairing his tattered image with the Republican base.

On Mr. Gillespie's watch, the president's speeches have grown shorter, his language punchier. When Mr. Bush threatens to veto a "three-bill pileup" or likens Congress to "a teenager with a new credit card," Gillespie-watchers all over Washington say they can hear the new counselor's voice.

"Ed believes that one of the reasons the Republicans lost is because we had lost our way on spending," said Pete Wehner, a former policy analyst for Mr. Bush who left the White House this spring. "He worked for Dick Armey; I think he's a small government conservative, and I think he believes Democrats and their spending habits are a target-rich environment."

And Democrats have provided targets, by waiting until two months into the new fiscal year to finish their appropriations work. Mr. Bush has already vetoed Democratic measures on children's health and Iraq war spending, and a water resources bill - all the while complaining lawmakers are wasting taxpayers' money, and scolding them like errant schoolchildren who forgot to turn in their homework.

"Listening to this, it has Ed Gillespie's fingerprints on it," said John Feehery, a Republican strategist. "It's shaping the message to pick the right fights - with a smile."

After two decades in Washington building up contacts on both sides of the aisle, Mr. Gillespie knows well the importance of the smile.

He also knows when he has to take the high road, and when he does not. In 2004, as party chairman, Mr. Gillespie was nicknamed Mr. Bush's "pit bull" for his relentless attacks on Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts.

Mr. Gillespie rarely gives on-the-record interviews - he declined to talk for this article - and he is almost never seen on television. And careful listeners to Mr. Bush will note that the president paints "Congress," and not "Democrats" as the villain - another Gillespie hallmark.

"He's a smart, shrewd operator," said Representative Rahm Emanuel, the chairman of the House Democratic caucus, who was a senior adviser to Mr. Clinton during the 1995 budget fight. But while Mr. Emanuel said he has "nothing but respect for Ed," he argued that, after seven years of runaway Republican spending, even a master strategist like Mr. Gillespie will have trouble remaking Mr. Bush's image.

"He's $4 trillion too late," Mr. Emanuel said.

At 46, Mr. Gillespie is part of a core of newcomers who are seeing Mr. Bush through the end of his presidency as his Texas inner circle breaks up. Unlike his predecessor, Dan Bartlett, who spent his entire adult life working for Mr. Bush, Mr. Gillespie not a presidential intimate, but neither is he a stranger.

In 2000, he was a member of the Gang of Six, a group of strategists for the Bush-Cheney campaign. That same year, he joined with Jack Quinn, a former White House counsel to Mr. Clinton, to found Quinn Gillespie & Associates, his lobbying firm. He earned a reported $4.75 million when he sold his share of the firm to join the White House, but he could easily pass through Washington's revolving door yet again, earning even more after Mr. Bush leaves office.

Mr. Gillespie's critics say he traded on his contacts to get rich. "He's so entwined with the Bush money machine," said Joan Claybrook, president of Public Citizen, a watchdog group.

But his admirers say he has not forgotten his roots. His father, an Irish immigrant, ran a mom-and-pop grocery store and later a bar in their hometown, Browns Mills, N.J. Mr. Gillespie spent his college years serving drinks and sweeping floors - experiences that, friends say, shape his work in the White House.

Mr. Gillespie has been deeply involved in Mr. Bush's so-called "kitchen table agenda," of issues like consumer safety and rising mortgage rates.

"Ed's got a pulse on what average Americans think about," said David Hobbs, a Republican lobbyist and a Gillespie friend.

The week before Mr. Gillespie officially took over as counselor, Mr. Bush's immigration bill collapsed on Capitol Hill - and with it, any real hope of bipartisan cooperation. One senior White House official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said Mr. Gillespie wasted little time.

"It went down in defeat, and he was moving on to the next thing," this official said. "The next thing was Iraq and the budget."

On Iraq, Mr. Gillespie took advantage of the Congressional recess in August to schedule a series of presidential speeches. At the time, Republicans like Senators Pete V. Domenici of New Mexico and Richard G. Lugar of Indiana were expressing deep misgivings about the war, so much so that even some White House officials thought they would lose Republican support in September. But in the end, Republicans stuck with Mr. Bush.

On the budget, Mr. Gillespie looked back to the Republican defeat of 1995. "We saw how Clinton did it, using the power of the presidency,"' Mr. Hobbs said.

Mr. Armey said Mr. Gillespie had argued that his party would lose because the public believed Republicans were antigovernment, "so therefore it is credible to argue Republicans shut government down."

He said Mr. Gillespie's strategy was to "understand the public's already conceived disposition," and create a story line around it.

That strategy was on full display in the Rose Garden last week, as Mr. Bush tapped into another preconceived notion, that lawmakers are lazy. The president opened his remarks by tweaking Democrats on the 30-second pro forma sessions they held to prevent him from making recess appointments over the Thanksgiving Day holiday.

"If 30 seconds is a full day," Mr. Bush said, "no wonder Congress has got a lot of work to do."

It was positively Gillespie-esque.