Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has decided the Senate Democrats will not temper their approach to Iraq legislation in an effort to gain Republican support.

Apparently 54% of Americans polled by Pew have said they want to bring the troops home as soon as possible. That number, if accurate, is dropping lately. The question is are the people who are being polled actual voters or just the average man or woman on the street?

The Democratic leader said he will call for a vote this month on several anti-war proposals, including one by Sen. Carl Levin that would insist President Bush end U.S. combat next summer. The proposals would be mandatory and not leave Bush wiggle room, said Reid, D-Nev.

“There (are) no goals. It’s all definite timelines,” he told reporters of the planned legislation.

Levin, D-Mich., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said Monday night he would have agreed to turn his summer deadline into a nonbinding goal if doing so meant attracting enough votes to pass. Several Republicans have said they are uneasy about Bush’s war strategy but do not like the idea of setting a firm timetable on troop withdrawals.

Reid’s hardline stance, announced after the party’s weekly policy lunch on Tuesday, reflects a calculation by Democrats that Levin’s proposal probably would have failed either way.

Maybe it’s bad legislation.

Most Republicans say they are willing to give Petraeus’ strategy more time to work.

“We either allow this strategy to succeed … or we don’t,” said Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., the top Republican on the Armed Services Committee and a GOP presidential hopeful. “And that’s why you see compromise after compromise failing to get a significant amount of support, because we are faced with basically two stark choices, and it’s very difficult to split the baby.”

Levin’s legislation would require that the U.S. begin withdrawing some troops from Iraq within 90 days, which Bush has already said he plans to do. It also would require that the U.S. hand off the combat mission to the Iraqis within nine months and restrict U.S. troops to such tasks as fighting terrorists and training the Iraqi security force.

Reid said the bill will be considered as an amendment to a defense policy bill on the floor, along with a proposal by Feingold that would cut off money for combat operations next year and one by Sen. Jim Webb, D-Va., limiting combat tours.

McCain blasted Webb’s amendment as “unconstitutional.”

“The Congress of the United States has the right to declare war and to fund armies and navies. It says nothing about setting tours of duties,” he said.

Another effort in futility, which reminds me of someone banging his head against the wall until the skin is nothing but pulp and his brain nothing but mush.

“But we must be loyal to the MoveOn base or we won’t get re-elected, regardless of how stupid it makes us look,” must be their thinking.