No emergency for Democrats

Donald Lambro:

If you wonder what happened to all that sound and fury from the Democrats over their troop withdrawal bills, they took off for an Easter break, leaving their unfinished business behind.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was on a tour of the Middle East, pretending to be secretary of state. Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama were off in search of more campaign money to bankroll their presidential ambitions. Most of the other Democrats were back home boasting about all that pork they stuffed into the emergency defense supplemental bill that is supposed to provide money just for our troops in Afghanistan and Iraq.
Some emergency. The differing versions will have to be reconciled in a House and Senate conference before a final vote takes place sometime after the "we're in no hurry" Democratic-run Congress gets back from its spring vacation.
U.S. military commanders in charge of the war say they will be running out of funds by the end of April at the earliest or by June at the latest. But Senate Democratic leader Harry Reid is in no hurry, pointing to a dubious Congressional Research Service report that says the military doesn't need new funding until July. Tell that to the troops who know otherwise.
But the final bill that emerges from conference isn't going anywhere. It will be vetoed by President Bush, as he has warned early on, and that will mean the Democrats will have to start over with yet another emergency bill that could take weeks more. If all this sounds like deliberate legislative stalling and foot-dragging by the Democrats on funding the war and our troops, that's exactly what it is.
They acknowledge they do not have the votes to cut off funds for the war, despite their majority in both houses of Congress, so they are doing the next best thing -- delaying the money as long as possible.
Ways and Means Chairman Charlie Rangel shot down a funding cutoff on "Meet the Press" Sunday when Tim Russert asked him, "If you want to stop the war, why not just simply cut all funding?" "Because you don't have the votes to do it. There's some people who believe that if you cut all the funding off, you leave our soldiers and military people exposed," Mr. Rangel replied.
He even admitted Democrats originally didn't have the votes for the bill that eventually passed in the House. Mrs. Pelosi and other Democratic leaders stuffed it with $20 billion worth of pure pork "because they needed the [Democratic] votes," Mr. Rangel said. "That bill, we lost so many Democrats because people thought we went too far and others because we didn't go far enough," he said.
...

Here is their game. They want to get closer to the date when funding becomes critical as a way of putting pressure on the President to compromise with them. That is also what Harry Reid's endorsement of Feingold's cutoff proposal is all about. He is taking an extreme position from which to compromise. This is not going to work and they are going to be forced to climb down and embarrass themselves.

The Democrat's contention that they are doing what they were elected to do is belied by Reid's statement in November after the election that they were not going to cut off funds. If they were elected to cut off funds, was Reid telling them days after the election that he was reneging? The fact is they did not run on cutting off funds because they would have lost if they did. They insisted at the time that they did not favor "cut and run" which is what the Bush administration accused them of.

Perhaps they wanted to cut and run all along but they sure did not campaign on that issue.

Pamela Meister comments on the conflicting positions on the Democrat mandate. See also this post on a Cliff May article. They definitely did not run on a slow bleed strategy.