The following is an excerpt from OpinionJournal.com’s “Best of the Web” written by the editor, James Taranto.
Quagmire at Home
The Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Wednesday voted 10-7 to approve President Obama’s request for an authorization to use military force in Syria. The Boston Globe reports the vote gives “more momentum to the White House plan.” It seems to us all one can say is that the request (“plan” gives the administration too much credit, as we shall argue below) has sufficient inertia that it is still moving forward–or, to be precise, that it was moving forward at the time of the vote.
The committee vote shows that both parties are divided. As the Washington Post notes, two of the panel’s 10 Democrats, Connecticut’s Chris Murphy and New Mexico’s Tom Udall, voted “no.” Three Republicans voted “yes.” The Senate’s most junior member, Massachusetts Democrat Ed Markey (elected in June to fill the John Kerry vacancy), voted “present,” although his comments suggest he was leaning toward “no” owing to “my worry about a greater involvement in Syria.”
One is tempted to mock Markey for that old Obama gambit–“he vowed to make a decision by next week,” the Globe reports–yet one resists the temptation when one reads his rationale: “Asked why he didn’t just oppose the authorization, as did some of his colleagues who had similar concerns, he said, ‘A “no” vote would have indicated I had sufficient information on which to base the decision. Which I did not.’ ” Given the way this administration bullied through ObamaCare and other domestic legislation, it is easy to believe that concern is well-founded.
Committees are not necessarily representative of the Senate as a whole (except in terms of their partisan makeup), but if we assume for the sake of argument that this one is with respect to this question, Senate passage will be a very close-run matter. Seven “no” votes out of 17 amount to a hair over 41%, just enough to sustain a filibuster. Add in Markey to make it eight votes of 18, and you’re at 44%.
And that’s in the chamber the president’s party controls. The situation in the House looks much tougher, as Bloomberg reports:
Speaker John Boehner and Democratic leader Nancy Pelosi voted the same way just five times in the past three years. Every time, the House has followed their lead.
That may change when it comes to Syria. Boehner and Pelosi are among about 20 members–or about 5 percent of the House–publicly supporting a military strike so far.
On the other side is an unusual alliance of Tea Party Republicans and antiwar Democrats who make up the bulk of at least 68 lawmakers opposed to military action–54 Republicans and 14 Democrats, according to a Bloomberg News tally.
It would take 217 votes to kill the measure in the House, or to pass it.
The Washington Post’s count has 88 noes, 92 “leaning no,” 20 yeses and 102 undecided. (There are two vacancies, so that leaves 131 representatives uncounted, presumably because they haven’t made any statement.) The noes and leaning noes add up to 180, or 37 short of a majority. The yeses so far come up short by 197. Again, both sides are bipartisan, though there are more Republicans than Democrats among the “noes” and “leaning noes” and vice-versa among the “yeses.” But there are more Democratic “noes”–never mind “leaning noes”–than “yeses.”
MSNBC host Chris Matthews is a strong Obama supporter, to the point that he routinely issues delusional denunciations of the president’s critics. But he’s also a Capitol Hill veteran, and Mediaite.com reports that he is skeptical of the bill’s prospects in the House:
“So you’ll have minority Republican vote, and Pelosi’s going to have to make up the difference with the minority caucus. She’s going to have to come in with a supermajority of Democrats to support their Democratic president. This is a wicked position they have put her in. Maybe she can meet the standard. But I don’t know whether [Chief of Staff Denis] McDonough and the president walking along the south lawn the other day were thinking about the endgame.”
“I think the Democrats are going to be forced to sacrifice men and women who really, really don’t want to vote for this,” Matthews concluded. “They’re going to have to vote for it to save the president’s hide. That’s a bad position to put your party in.”
If the Code Pink gals had any wit, they’d adopt the slogan NO BLOOD FOR HIDE. To be sure, Pelosi and Obama pulled off a similar feat with the ObamaCare vote in 2010, and they had to do it without a single Republican vote. But this time they would need some GOP votes as well even if the Democrats were unanimous–and saving “the president’s hide” is, to say the least, a less powerful incentive on the Republican side of the aisle. So far, according to the Post’s list, 23 Democrats are committed noes while only 8 Republicans are yeses.
There are reasons to suspect that the effort may be losing rather than gaining momentum. Congressmen respond to their constituents, and the Washington Post reports (with a Fox Butterfield twist): “Americans widely oppose launching missile strikes against the Syrian government for its alleged use of chemical weapons, according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll that finds little appetite for military action across the country despite a growing drumbeat in Washington.”
The breakdown is fascinating. Overall opposition is 59%, versus 36% support. But Democrats and Republicans are both somewhat moreinclined than the population as a whole to offer support (Democrats are 54% to 42% against, Republicans 55% to 43%). Most opposed are independents, by 66% to 30%.
One difference from ObamaCare is that a vote in favor appealed to the Democratic base, even if the legislation itself did not go far enough. But MoveOn.org reports that 73% of its hard-left members oppose action in Syria. The Republican base is as anti-interventionist as it’s been since the early years of the Cold War, but even many hawks are skeptical of the Syria operation.
Republicans also have reason to suspect that Obama’s decision to request congressional approval was an effort to put them on the spot–and his ludicrous denial yesterday that he “set a red line” or that his credibility is at stake reinforces that view.
The fierce watchdogs of the press, confronted with this brazen falsehood, show themselves once again to be Obama’s pet hamsters. Instead of giving a “pants on fire” rating, PolitiFact.com’s Jon Greenberg claims Obama was “reframing comments rather than denying them.” Greenberg can’t even say the statement is half true, so he withholds a rating altogether. Peter Baker of the New York Times has his own euphemisms, writing that Obama was “citing longstanding international norms” and “trying to break out of his isolation.” The funniest dodges come from Shawna Thomas of NBC News, who on Twitter calls Obama’s whopper “a definite change in tone” and an attempt “to unilaterally widen the circle of responsibility.”
That last one is priceless. Next time someone accuses you of trying to weasel out of a commitment, say you’re just trying to widen the circle of responsibility.
The Washington Free Beacon, meanwhile, reports that Secretary of State Kerry didn’t get the memo: In congressional testimony yesterday “referenced . . . the date when ‘the president drew the red line publicly.’ ” That’s right, John Kerry is more forthright than the average journalist.
The problem is that Obama’s effort to evade responsibility is tailor-made to alienate potential Republican supporters in Congress without having any apparent upside in terms of attracting Democrats. And all that journalistic spin will not win over the Republicans; if anything, it will have the opposite effect.
Which leads to a question: What does Obama intend to do if Congress rejects the authorization to use force in Syria?
That was actually one of the questions asked by the reporter who prompted the “I didn’t set a red line” tale. Even PolitiFact’s Greenberg stepped off the exercise wheel for a moment and straightforwardly acknowledged that “Obama did not answer.”
Here is how Obama addressed the question: “. . . which brings me to the last question. And that is what happens if Congress doesn’t approve it. I believe that Congress will approve it. I believe Congress will approve it because . . .”
That’s the administration’s line. Here’s Kerry, answering the same question from Chris Wallace on “Fox News Sunday”:
Wallace: What if Congress refuses to authorize action, what happens then?
Kerry: I don’t believe that’s going to happen. I think the stakes of upholding the international standard of behavior that has been in place since 1925, after World War I, that only Adolf Hitler and Saddam Hussein have breached that in time of war since then, and now Assad joins them–I think to contemplate that the Congress of the United States would turn its back on Israel, on Jordan, on Turkey, on our allies in the region, turn its back on innocent Syrian people who have been slaughtered by this gas, and those who yet may be subject to an attack, if we don’t stand up to this, I can’t contemplate that the Congress would turn its back on all of that responsibility and the fact that we would have in fact granted impunity to a ruthless dictator to continue to gas his people. Those are the stakes. And I don’t believe the Congress will do that.
If we take Obama and Kerry at their word, then the president did not even consider the possibility that Congress would reject his request. Given the haste in which he made the decision and the desultoriness of his own effort to make the case for the request, that is a plausible reading of what happened.
Failing to consider this contingency would be a stunning failure of planning. Although the resolution may yet pass, it is clear by now that any assumption that it would pass easily was a gross misreading of both public and congressional opinion. The only explanation we can think of is that he expected Democrats to be loyal and Republicans to be enthusiastic about intervention. The former expectation can be put down to overconfidence (and of course many Democrats are loyal), but the latter would be a case of ignorant stereotyping.
The other possibility is that Obama did not regard approval as a sure thing but figured that he’d win either way–that if Republicans balked, he could blame them for inaction in Syria, and if they went along with intervention, they’d share the blame for anything that went wrong. Approaching the matter so cynically would be despicable, but in any case it is difficult to imagine Obama would get any political mileage out of being thwarted by Congress.
Further, Obama and Kerry’s refusal (or inability) to answer the question of what they intend to do if lawmakers reject the measure makes a mockery of any claim that they are treating Congress as a coequal branch of government. If it’s true, as Kerry claims, that they are unable to contemplate the possibility, then they are treating Congress as a rubber stamp. Perhaps they do have an idea about what they’ll do if Congress rejects the authorization. But in that case, by withholding that information, they are preventing lawmakers from making an informed decision.
Again, one needn’t assume bad motives here, only dumb strategy. Obama has painted himself into a corner in which he needs to maintain uncertainty about this question. He can’t disavow the authority to attack without congressional authorization, because then a “no” vote unambiguously ties his hands. But he can’t say he’s likely to attack anyway, because in that case no congressman has any reason to vote “yes.”
But approval of the authorization entails plenty of uncertainty too. As we argued Tuesday, Obama and Kerry are promising a “limited and tailored” attack–what we used to call a “cakewalk” before Iraq taught us better–in order to “send a message” to Bashar Assad. What happens if he doesn’t get the message? What if he uses chemical weapons again or attacks the U.S. armed forces?
Sen. Markey is not wrong to worry about “a greater involvement in Syria.” Our primary fear, however, is the opposite: that Obama would cut and run. That seems to be in his character. It is what he did in Benghazi when he denied military backup to Americans under fire. In a different way it is what he did in Stockholm yesterday by announcing, in effect: The world ate my homework.
Reader Duane Hershberger responds to our (highly unenthusiastic) arguments in favor of authorizing the use of force:
“Congress must shore up America’s credibility by giving its assent (even though he claims he does not need it) to [Obama], so that he will back up his words with actions.”
Your argument Tuesday follows this line. You confirm it Wednesday: “This column does not disagree with that argument . . .”
I can respect the logic you followed. However, since we can be quite certain that the president’s mendacity will continue after Congress takes a vote he has said he doesn’t need, and broadly hints he will feel free to ignore, your conclusion is not compelling. The president’s credibility cannot be restored by a congressional vote. Nor can America’s, because the president will fritter it away. There are choices this president will make beyond the current crisis. They will most assuredly be the wrong choices. Barack Obama pursues a course not of law, but of narcissistic personality cult. Congress should tell the world that is not how the United States makes policy.
It is certainly plausible that denying him any leeway would be the better choice for the country’s credibility and security. The message might be, “Never elect such a person again.”
This column does not disagree with that argument either. We’re glad we’re not in Congress. Obama’s strategic languidness has put lawmakers in a position such that many of them will be unable to vote either “yes” or “no” in good conscience. And with his failure to develop even a political strategy for approaching Congress on this matter, he has managed the dubious achievement of leading the U.S. into a foreign-policy quagmire without firing a shot.
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