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R vs. D calculus devolves into odd alliances
Syria debate twists Beltway playbook
THE WASHINGTON POST
WASHINGTON – Syria has utterly confounded the Washington political establishment, from the White House to the Capitol. There's no script for what's been happening. The usual political polarization, the simple calculus of R vs. D, has disintegrated into a tangle of uncomfortable alliances.
President Barack Obama has sought congressional approval for military strikes against the Syrian regime for allegedly using chemical weapons, and that requires him to harvest support from anywhere and everywhere on the political spectrum — even on the fringes. He could use an "aye," for example, from Arizona Rep. Trent Franks. But here's Franks, in a subterranean corridor, emerging Monday from a briefing on Syria: "It just seems that everything the president touches in foreign policy, he injects it with chaos and death."
So he's not an Obama fan. But he also abhors the Syrian regime. Franks said he's "undeclared" on how he'll vote. Undecided? No, just undeclared. He wouldn't even confirm that he's made up his mind.
This is an unusual Washington moment, with few if any precedents in recent memory. The situation changes at Twitter velocity. The administration's tone in recent days has evolved from bellicose to diplomatic. Obama's decision to address the entire country in a prime-time broadcast Tuesday signaled the gravity of the situation, but the president and his proxies have sent mixed messages about what they're hoping to achieve in Syria and about the scale of the military actions they anticipate.
A surprise Russian overture — an offer to put Syria's chemical weapons under international control — further scrambled any sense of where this is leading. The only thing certain at this point is that a military strike against Syria would arrive with the same element of surprise as Christmas.
Decisions on war and peace are always fraught with constitutional questions, and the War Powers Resolution, passed in the 1970s after the Vietnam War, gives Congress a certain degree of authority to approve or deny the deployment of forces in war zones.
But the role of Congress is also circumscribed by that same resolution. The president has up to 90 days to take military action without seeking congressional approval, but there is always debate about when, precisely, the clock starts ticking, and what, exactly, constitutes hostilities, said Douglas Kriner, an associate professor of political science at Boston University and the author of "After the Rubicon: Congress, Presidents and the Politics of Waging War."
Obama seemed poised to order airstrikes against the Syrian government 10 days ago, but at the last moment he shocked his aides and many allies by kicking the question to Congress, where the president has few close friends among Democrats and where many Republican lawmakers are loath to say yes to anything the president favors.
Barring a Russian breakthrough, or some other diplomatic solution, Congress will have to do something it doesn't like to do and hasn't been good at doing for a long time: Make a decision.
In Washington, indecision on big matters has become a refined art. This week, for example, congressional leaders will once again deploy a favorite tool of collective indecision on the budget, the "continuing resolution," a way of punting harder decisions until the end of the year, or even longer. The sequester is already chewing through agency budgets even though most everyone who created those budget cuts agreed they were a terrible way to trim spending. It's just easier than making decisions on how to do that.
Obama, in effect, is forcing Congress to share the ownership, for better or worse, of American military policy toward Syria, a situation that offers no attractive options. If Obama had gone ahead with the military strikes in August, and they had turned out badly, opponents in Congress would "just sit back and hammer him on it," Kriner said.
The two parties have become more ideologically coherent in the last couple of decades, leading to a profusion of party-line votes. But if Congress goes ahead with a Syria vote, the votes of individual lawmakers will be hard to predict, because there are so many different reasons to be for or against the military strikes. The ayes and nays don't organize themselves neatly along the partisan divide. "It's like what Congress looked like in the '70s," said Steve Teles, an associate professor of political science at Johns Hopkins University.
Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul has threatened to filibuster the military authorization resolution in the Senate. "We will ensure that it's a 60-vote margin," he said.
Some lawmakers think the president should have acted straightaway rather than looking for congressional approval.
But many other members of Congress had asked to be looped into the decision. And the fact that the process has become messy is just the way democracy is supposed to work, said Democratic Rep. John Larson, one of the president's allies on the Syria issue. Liberally paraphrasing the famed judge Learned Hand, Larson said, "Democracy and freedom is that which leaves you not too sure."
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Syria debate twists Beltway playbook
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2013/09/11/world/syria-debate-twists-beltway-playbook/
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