Democrats fail to get enough Republican votes

Democrats failed to get enough Republican votes.

LOS ANGELES TIMES

WASHINGTON — To a crescendo of clicking cameras, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi stepped before a row of shimmering U.S. flags last March to make an announcement Americans had been waiting four months to hear.

November’s elections had swept Democrats into power on a wave of frustration with the Iraq war. Flanked by three committee chairmen in her ceremonial Capitol office, the San Francisco congresswoman unveiled the party’s plan to bring the troops home.

Now, the legislative drive against the war — the most intense on Capitol Hill since the Vietnam era — is all but over. As Wisconsin Sen. Russ Feingold, a leading anti-war Democrat, bluntly put it: “We have made no progress.”

What happened?

The answer lies partly in the slim Democratic majority and a determined Republican president. But it was the new Democratic majority’s inability to work across the aisle that ultimately ensured failure.

Like the Republicans they had replaced, senior Democrats chose confrontation over cooperation. They squandered opportunities to work with Republicans unhappy with the president. And, under pressure from their anti-war base, they tried to bully their rivals.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a conservative Democrat from Nevada who had worked often with Republicans, turned to Virginia Sen. John W. Warner.

His decision to effectively cede control of the war debate to a lawmaker from the president’s party was the calculation of a veteran tactician. Democrats had taken control of the Senate by the narrowest of margins, 51-49. (The chamber’s two independents typically side with the Democrats.) If they wanted to force the president to do anything, they’d need as many as a dozen Republicans to overcome a filibuster.

But Reid, a former boxer, was also a fierce partisan who had excelled as a leader by keeping Democrats together. That impulse would be decisive.

As Warner walked the hallways of the Senate trying to find GOP votes and proposed weakening his resolution, the staunchest antiwar members of Reid’s caucus grew increasingly restive.

Within days, Feingold said he would oppose the resolution. So too did Connecticut’s Christopher J. Dodd, another liberal Democrat. Reid, who was skeptical that Warner could deliver enough Republicans, cut off debate. GOP senators killed the measure on a procedural vote.

After just four weeks, the drive to build consensus was effectively over.

No Democratic withdrawal measure ever won more than four GOP votes in the House or Senate.

By September, when Army Gen. David H. Petraeus gave Congress an upbeat report about declining violence, the Democratic legislative campaign against the war was effectively dead.