Kabuki authorization

Kabuki authorization

by digby

Greg Sargent lays out the White House strategy to get Democrats on board with the Syrian strikes:
If Congress does get to Yes on Syria, it won’t be hard to see why. What’s happening here is that Congress is being given a way to rein in the White House on Syria without saying No to authorizing the punitive strikes the Obama administration wants to launch.

Today, the President and the White House will very likely weigh in on the latest turn in the debate, providing more clues to where it’s headed.

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress have introduced new versions of the Syria resolution that contain far stricter limits on Obama’s authority than the previous resolution offered by the White House. The version introduced by House Dems is here; the one introduced by a bipartisan group of Senators is here. Both stipulate no ground troops will be deployed and both limit force to 60 days (the Senate version allows one 30-day extension). The House version explicitly limits strikes to retaliation against use of chemical weapons, as opposed to broader efforts to degrade the Syrian military. The two versions probably won’t be hard to mesh.

You can probably expect Obama and/or the White House to say generally positive things about these resolutions today, thus signaling a willingness to limit the mission in keeping with what Congress wants.

Ultimately what this will do is give those members of Congress who appear inclined to support the general need for action against Assad a way to argue to constituents that they have placed substantial limits on the White House’s authority to wage war. Members of Congress were shocked by the broadness of the White House’s initial request for authority, but — whether by mistake or by design — it has given Congress a way to appear to be taking action to place tight limits on Obama’s warmaking authority.
He points out that this will widely be seen as kabuki (and acknowledges that it pretty much is.) I'm not sure of that --- I think the press will present this exactly as the White House and the leadership wants them to and most citizens will accept it at face value.

But I'm on the record about this already.
I'm going to guess that the Democrats ... will pretty easily be persuaded to authorize strikes once they've been able to pretend that they are watering down the president's proposal. (I'm fairly sure that was worked out in advance.) I would love to think I'm wrong about this but recent experience shows that the president's party almost always backs the president on these things and depending on the political climate, a fairly substantial faction of the opposition balks. Both parties are extremely hypocritical in these matters.
Still, this has been less predictable than usual. I was certainly surprised by the British vote and the president pulling the plug n the strikes to go to congress was a surprise. So, who knows?


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