Republicans jumping ship?
Posted: Wednesday, January 17, 2007 2:09 PM by Huma Zaidi
Filed Under:
Congress, Security
From NBC's Mike Viqueira
In addition to Senate Republicans, the White House has invited Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to discuss Iraq policy. But is it too late? One conservative House Republican says that the feeling among "thinking members" on his side is that "the president has no credibility" left on the subject of Iraq. House leaders, led by John Boehner, have been hosting a series of "listening sessions" with the rank-and-file to determine what can be done to head off a mass exodus on Iraq policy, short of voting with Democrats.
In the meantime, while House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats had planned to simply put the president's new policy into legislative form and have an up or down "vote of confidence" on the plan, they are now expected to do something similar to follow the Senate's lead. The Senate plan, to be announced by Sens. Chuck Hagel, Joe Biden, and Carl Levin later today, more forthrightly states that it is "not in the national interest" to escalate the troop levels in Iraq. House Majority Leader Harry Reid has come to them and said that he expects 12 Republicans to vote with him and against the president.
But things are a little less clear on the House side. While Democratic leaders suspect that they could get as many as 60 Republican votes against the president on the "augmentation," relatively few have come out publicly. Best to let the Senate go first, the thinking therefore goes, and once they see their Senate counterparts jumping ship, House Repubublicans will have cover to do the same.
