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.

I don’t usually write anything in e-mails that I’m going to be ashamed of. This is an issue that rubs people in different ways. I personally don’t care if they read my e-mails or listen in on my phone calls.

President Bush signed into law on Sunday legislation that broadly expanded the government’s authority to eavesdrop on the international telephone calls and e-mail messages of American citizens without warrants.

Congressional aides and others familiar with the details of the law said that its impact went far beyond the small fixes that administration officials had said were needed to gather information about foreign terrorists. They said seemingly subtle changes in legislative language would sharply alter the legal limits on the government’s ability to monitor millions of phone calls and e-mail messages going in and out of the United States.

They also said that the new law for the first time provided a legal framework for much of the surveillance without warrants that was being conducted in secret by the National Security Agency and outside the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, the 1978 law that is supposed to regulate the way the government can listen to the private communications of American citizens.

“This more or less legalizes the N.S.A. program,” said Kate Martin, director of the Center for National Security Studies in Washington, who has studied the new legislation.

Previously, the government needed search warrants approved by a special intelligence court to eavesdrop on telephone conversations, e-mail messages and other electronic communications between individuals inside the United States and people overseas, if the government conducted the surveillance inside the United States.

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This gets more and more interesting every day.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has a little trick up his sleeve that could spell an end to President Bush’s devilish recess appointments of controversial figures like former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton. We hear that over the long August vacation, when those types of summer hires are made, Reid will call the Senate into session just long enough to force the prez to send his nominees who need confirmation to the chamber. The talk is he will hold a quickie “pro forma” session every 10 days, tapping a local senator to run the hall. Senate workers and Republicans are miffed, but Reid is proving that he’s the new sheriff in town.

Story here

In the ongoing feud between the legislative and executive branches of our government, Rep. John Conyers has served the subpoena authorized a few weeks ago to compel Attorney General Gonzales to give more information on the firings of the US Attorneys.

It’s important for everyone to remember the Executive Branch has total control over whom they hire, whom they fire and for whatever reasons, including no reasons.

Admittedly, the spokespersons for the Justice Department, including Gonzales, did themselves no favors in the way they botched up the testimony they already gave.

Just sit there and say you did it and quit trying to dig a deeper hole making up a story about why. Say you did it because it was your right to do so and that’s it.

Why congress thinks this is something they need to involve themselves in seems to be just another way to force Gonzales out of office so we can have another food-fight trying to confirm a new Attorney General.

Dear Lord, how did this great country ever come to this?

This editorial appeared in today’s Washington Post, a newspaper that is certainly no friend to President Bush or to conservatives in general.

HOUSE SPEAKER Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) offered an excellent demonstration yesterday of why members of Congress should not attempt to supplant the secretary of state when traveling abroad. After a meeting with Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad in Damascus, Ms. Pelosi announced that she had delivered a message from Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert that “Israel was ready to engage in peace talks” with Syria. What’s more, she added, Mr. Assad was ready to “resume the peace process” as well. Having announced this seeming diplomatic breakthrough, Ms. Pelosi suggested that her Kissingerian shuttle diplomacy was just getting started. “We expressed our interest in using our good offices in promoting peace between Israel and Syria,” she said.

Only one problem: The Israeli prime minister entrusted Ms. Pelosi with no such message. “What was communicated to the U.S. House Speaker does not contain any change in the policies of Israel,” said a statement quickly issued by the prime minister’s office. In fact, Mr. Olmert told Ms. Pelosi that “a number of Senate and House members who recently visited Damascus received the impression that despite the declarations of Bashar Assad, there is no change in the position of his country regarding a possible peace process with Israel.” In other words, Ms. Pelosi not only misrepresented Israel’s position but was virtually alone in failing to discern that Mr. Assad’s words were mere propaganda.

Ms. Pelosi responded by pointing out that Republican congressmen had visited Syria without drawing presidential censure. That’s true enough — but those other congressmen didn’t try to introduce a new U.S. diplomatic initiative in the Middle East. “We came in friendship, hope, and determined that the road to Damascus is a road to peace,” Ms. Pelosi grandly declared.

The really striking development here is the attempt by a Democratic congressional leader to substitute her own foreign policy for that of a sitting Republican president. Two weeks ago Ms. Pelosi rammed legislation through the House of Representatives that would strip Mr. Bush of his authority as commander in chief to manage troop movements in Iraq. Now she is attempting to introduce a new Middle East policy that directly conflicts with that of the president. We have found much to criticize in Mr. Bush’s military strategy and regional diplomacy. But Ms. Pelosi’s attempt to establish a shadow presidency is not only counterproductive, it is foolish.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. Rep. Pelosi is first of all a representative of her congressional district in the San Francisco area, and is not the representative of the entire United States government.

Unless you live in her district she does not represent you. Her position as Speaker of the House means she is the leader of the Democrat Caucus in the House and since the Democrats are in the majority she holds the title Speaker of the House, and as such can set the legislative agenda and make committee appointments for the Democrats only in the United States House of Representatives.

No one has confirmed her as any kind of ambassador for the United States, and her (appropriately named in this editorial) shadow presidency is doing nothing to help this country, but is hurting it instead.

There will be no censure by Congress of Ms. Pelosi because her party controls the Congress, but the American people are aware of what she is doing and may have a lot to say about it in November 2008.

“Politics stop at the water’s edge” used to be the old saying, but lately we have seen former President Jimmy Carter, former President Clinton and former Vice President Al Gore disparage their own country while in foreign lands.

This trip by Ms. Pelosi and all those who accompanied her is nothing but a slap in the face to the Constitution of the United States in order to slap the face of the President of the United States, and it is disgraceful.

Big Mo has a wonderful post up at Hang Right Politics, showing us, according to James Madison, one of our founding fathers, why Nancy Pelosi’s trip to Syria which has been described by Rep. Tom Lantos as “an alternative Democrat foreign policy” is possibly going to get us into a constitutional crisis.

Some quotes:

For proof that what she and her party is doing is so outrageous, I give you none other than the father of the Constitution, James Madison, who explained the necessity for the separation of powers in Federalist #51:

But the great security against a gradual concentration of the several powers in the same department, consists in giving to those who administer each department the necessary constitutional means and personal motives to resist encroachments of the others. The provision for defense must in this, as in all other cases, be made commensurate to the danger of attack. Ambition must be made to counteract ambition. The interest of the man must be connected with the constitutional rights of the place. It may be a reflection on human nature, that such devices should be necessary to control the abuses of government. But what is government itself, but the greatest of all reflections on human nature? If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary. In framing a government which is to be administered by men over men, the great difficulty lies in this: you must first enable the government to control the governed; and in the next place oblige it to control itself.

From Federalist #53, speaking on House members:

And although the House of Representatives is not immediately to participate in foreign negotiations and arrangements, yet from the necessary connection between the several branches of public affairs, those particular branches will frequently deserve attention in the ordinary course of legislation, and will sometimes demand particular legislative sanction and co-operation.

And in a speech on June 8, 1789, to the House, proposing the Bill of Rights:

The powers delegated by this constitution, are appropriated to the departments to which they are respectively distributed: so that the legislative department shall never exercise the powers vested in the executive or judicial; nor the executive exercise the powers vested in the legislative or judicial; nor the judicial exercise the powers vested in the legislative or executive departments.

No matter who the president is and no matter if we agree or disagree with his foreign policy it is his turf and his turf alone. Certainly not the turf of the Speaker of the House.