Escalation

A very good post by Josh Marshall on Congress' control of the purse strings and why Congress must exercise it.

. . . we have a president who has a basic contempt for our system of government and the rule of law and that the normal rules of inter-branch comity simply aren't in effect.

Nancy Pelosi has taken exactly the right tack on this, with her declaration that Congress will not fund the president's escalation of the war in Iraq -- and please note that critical point: will not fund the escalation.

"If the president wants to add to this mission, he is going to have to justify it," said Pelosi, speaking to host Bob Schieffer. "And this is new for him because up until now the Republican Congress has given him a blank check with no oversight, no standards, no conditions. And we’ve gone into this situation, which is a war without end, which the American people have rejected."

"If the president chooses to escalate the war, in his budget request we want to see a distinction between what is there to support the troops who are there now. The American people and the Congress support those troops. We will not abandon them."

Barack Obama, of whom the more I hear the less I like, seems to be coming down on both sides of the question. On the one hand, he's opposing the "surge." On the other hand, he's claining the Congress can't stop it. (I've seen him quoted on both sides of the question in the past couple of days -- I'll post the links if I can find them again.)

Joe Biden, whom I have never considered presidential material, screwed it up even worse:

MR. RUSSERT: ...there’s really little Democrats can do. Why not cut off funding for the war?

SEN. BIDEN: I’ve been there, Tim. You can’t do it.

MR. RUSSERT: Why?

SEN. BIDEN: You can’t do it. It’s—what—because it made sense in the Constitution when you said you could cut off funding when you had no standing army. We have a standing army with a budget of hundreds of billions of dollars. You can’t go in and, like a tinker toy, and play around and say, “You can’t spend the money on this piece and this piece and”—he—able—he’ll be able to keep those troops there forever constitutionally if he wants to.

It's unconstitutional to tell the president no? As John Murtha pointed out, that's bullshit.

UPDATE: Mary Lederman pretty much demolishes Biden's position"

Even if there were a prohibition in the Constitution against so-called congressional "micromanagement" of a war -- and there's not -- this wouldn't be that. There would be no congressional officials here overseeing the President's discretionary responsibilities; no requirement that the President get approval of one or both Houses before taking certain actions. There would, instead, simply be limitations on a war imposed by statutes passed with the President's signature or by supermajorities of both Houses of Congress over the President's veto.

Read the whole post.