Not often that I bring hope on a topic on which Stoller is downbeat!

It's a small hope, in which I place no trust at all. But it deserves consideration.

Stoller quotes Greenwald, taken as something of a sage on these matters, saying that

it is clear that Congressional Democrats are not working at all towards the goal of forcing an end to the war.

But the boys at Politico have Murtha about to go live with his cunning plan to do exactly that:

Murtha, the powerful chairman of the defense subcommittee of the House Appropriations Committee, will seek to attach a provision to an upcoming $93 billion supplemental spending bill for Iraq and Afghanistan. It would restrict the deployment of troops to Iraq unless they meet certain levels adequate manpower, equipment and training to succeed in combat. That's a standard Murtha believes few of the units Bush intends to use for the surge would be able to meet.

In addition, Murtha, acting with the backing of the House Democratic leadership, will seek to limit the time and number of deployments by soldiers, Marines and National Guard units to Iraq, making it tougher for Pentagon officials to find the troops to replace units that are scheduled to rotate out of the country. Additional funding restrictions are also being considered by Murtha, such as prohibiting the creation of U.S. military bases inside Iraq, dismantling the notorious Abu Ghraib prison and closing the American detention facility in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

"There's a D-Day coming in here, and it's going to start with the supplemental and finish with the '08 [defense] budget," said Rep. Neil Abercrombie, D-Hawaii, who chairs the Air and Land Forces subcommittee of the House Armed Services Committee.

I suspect it's going to be some time before we see legislative language on Murtha's proposals. And there are certainly a good deal of practical questions to be explored, apart from partisan considerations: for instance, given the amount of overstretch that Iraq deployments have caused, it may be that reasonable restrictions would essentially bar the deployment of any units of a particular specialty.

How would such a provision fare, assuming it was included in the Iraq supplemental bill reported out by Apps?

Count first, strategize afterwards.

Is there a majority in the House for the provision? Among the House measures introduced so far in the 110th, there are none that, from their description in the page of THOMAS search results, appears to match what Murtha will supposedly propose.

It doesn't explicitly require anything in US Iraq policy to be changed. It doesn't set a withdrawal date, it doesn't propose defunding the surge. It could, naively, be presented as a measure favoring troop welfare and defense preparedness.

But the fear of Dem reps would naturally be that the media (with GOP encouragement, natch) would spin it as backdoor defunding, and the Dems wouldn't be able to shift the idea.

If there isn't a majority in the House - and my gut tells me there currently isn't - for the Murtha proposal, Pelosi will try to shield it (and her dissenting members) by avoiding a vote on the proposal.

Apps bills are usually dealt with on the House floor under an open (or modified open) rule. A rule like H Res 157 (the rule under which the current Iraq res is being dealt with), allowing no floor amendments, would therefore be a hard sell!

I find it hard to think that there would not be a vote on an amendment striking the Murtha proviso. And, if so, I'm currently inclined to think it would pass.

Failing evidence of an actual whip count, what is there to suggest that Murtha may command a majority in the House?

Well, it seems that this is a leadership ploy; and I'd like to think that Pelosi would not be getting hopes up unless she was fairly certain that the Murtha proviso would pass the House.

I'd like to think that...

Update [2007-2-15 16:50:55 by skeptic06]:

Murtha has given a web interview to MoveCongress.org on his plan.

There's no transcript - which is unhelpful. But this guy - absolutely not an unbiased source! - has some worrying things to say about what Murtha said in the interview.

I'm not placing any reliance on this report. But, if it checked out, it would give more cause for concern about the whole concept of the Murtha proviso.

The aim of the GOP will be to avoid being pressed back to their redoubt of the Dems don't support the troops - and, in the debates, concentrate on being helpful in pointing out how impractical or self-contradictory the proviso is.

Until we see the legislative language, it's hard to judge exactly how vulnerable it might be to this sort of nonpartisan attack.

I'm sure Murtha's people are working right now with the Office of Legal Counsel (whose guys actually write the legislation) to make it as attack-proof as possible.