Forty Hours and a Resolution
Posted at: http://www.bravehumans.com/2007/02/23/forty-hours-and-a-resolution/
Posted with permission

Hello all. Before I get into this post, I would like to reiterate Rick’s plea to expand the reach of Bravehumans. If you read my posts you know I’m a Democrat, and I lean at least a bit (maybe a lot) to the left. This describes the majority of the folks I’ve met here on Bravehumans, and that is problem I am desperate to solve. We need balanced presentation: left, right, and center for Bravehumans to work. We have the left, we have SOME of the center, but we need much more for the right. Please, if you’re a conservative and what you read here makes you think or just annoys you, comment and post. If you know a conservative, please turn him or her on to the site. The point of the post that follows here is the importance of having real, substantive debate. You need all relevant sides to have a debate, and then you have to gather the courage to have one. Please help.

Thanks.

The House of Representatives just finished what, in some ways, was a fairly historic process. Over the past week every member of the 435-seat house got the opportunity to get up and speak for about 5 minutes about a current piece of House business. That works out to just over 36 hours of statements. They actually ended up with over 40 hours of statements from most members when all was said and done. My point here is that this was a fairly unique process that took a great deal of time and effort on the part of the House members.

As many Americans are aware, the topic of this roughly 40-hour marathon was a vote on a non-binding resolution on the current troop increase in Iraq ordered by the President. The resolution (paraphrased) states that the House a) supports the U.S. troops and b) opposes the troop increase. That’s it. The resolution subsequently passed along largely party lines (17 Republicans voted yes and 2 Democrats voted no).

So what’s the result of this process? Well, it’s hard to tell. For starters, a non-binding resolution on anything has no direct impact on law, practice, or policy. By itself it does nothing. In contrast, its symbolic value may be fairly high. It is extremely uncommon for either house of Congress to endorse any rebuke of the wartime policy of a sitting President., the general consensus being that the government should keep a united front on such issues. As possible evidence of this, Democrats were unable to bring an identical resolution to a vote in the Senate.

In addition, House Democrats promise that this resolution is just the first step in an attack on the President’s Iraq policy more globally. After the House vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid seemed to support this view by calling Iraq the “worst foreign policy disaster in U.S. History”. This definitely signals that Democratic attacks are going to get more aggressive. Senators Joe Biden and Carl Levin have started discussing revisiting the 2002 Iraq authorization as well.

Although I can see the connection between the resolution and these new Democratic moves (regardless of whether or not I support them), I wonder why the Democrats couldn’t just cut to the chase and start HERE rather than with the non-binding resolution. Regardless of what we may believe about these more substantive moves, why not start with substance?

One possible reason given for spending the time and effort on the non-binding resolution was to promote debate on Iraq within the Congress. This is the reason that really bugs me and I’m not alone. Here’s why:

When I was in High School I was forced into a debate class to meet an English requirement. I disliked the class, but I did learn what a debate is. As I understand it, you have (at least) 2 opposing points of view on a specific topic. OK. Check. We have opposing points of view on Iraq within the House. Each side then states its specific side as well as it can, based on both rhetoric and evidence. OK. Check. We have statements both for and against clearly stated, and more or less based on what each side refers to as evidence. Here’s where I think the 40 some-odd hours spent in the House fall apart. In a debate, each side is then required to further defend their position from the opposition and further refute the arguments of the opposition in order to strengthen its own position. This can go on for several rounds.

The point of a debate is to have everyone involved come out at the end with a better (read deeper and more nuanced) understanding of the problem at hand. In some cases one side wins and the other loses, but often not. The point is we all get closer to at least dealing more effectively with the problem at hand. This is simply not what happened in the House. I think we desperately need 40 hours of debate on Iraq. What we got was 40 hours of individual (largely pre-written) position statements on a very specific resolution. Despite what it is being called, there simply was no debate. Each House member got up and essentially reiterated his or her (likely) already well-articulated position on this particular resolution. There was little, if any, give and take in these prepared statements. I watched as much of this as I could on C-span. For the 40 minutes or so I watched before I fell asleep from sheer boredom it was simply a monotonous repetition of the party line of each side. Again, It’s hard to stress how little this bit of theater resembled an actual debate.

According to news reports, a highlight of the process was a speech by Rep. Sam Johnson(Republican of Texas) in which he described his harrowing experience as a POW and issued a powerful emotional appeal to vote against the resolution. He firmly believes that it is the first step in blocking funding for the war and, therefore, for the troops who fight it. He may well be right (Democratic protestations to the contrary). Cutting the funding is the main weapon Congress has to influence war policy in the White House. But whether or not he’s right is not my point. If this process had been an actual debate, Rep. Johnson’s comments would have been in response to a specific argument made by a previous speaker. The next speaker would then focus directly on Rep. Johnson’s comments and attempt to refute them. I did not see the specific speakers on either side of Johnson, but I am fairly sure (based on the 40 minutes I DID see) that they read prepared statements just as he did. Others who reported on the process support this.

There were days, if not weeks, of political wrangling leading up to the vote on the resolution. This was followed by roughly 40 hours of position statements by most of the House membership. This was followed by a vote, the outcome of which was a foregone conclusion and which had no direct impact on policy in any form. One of the main justifications for this process was to provide a desperately needed opportunity for a debate on the war. This debate did not happen. After all of this, I am left knowing no more than I did before it started and seeing no more clearly concerning the profoundly complex issues involved. I am, however, left a bit more disillusioned with my government.

Be Brave. Be Human.
-Grant

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