Sunday, April 1, 2007 | 7:32 a.m.
WASHINGTON - The Senate surprised Washington last week when 50 senators voted for a timetable for withdrawing troops from Iraq, setting up a showdown with President Bush, who has vowed to veto the legislation.
After Tuesday night's historic vote, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid returned to his Capitol offices and uttered the understatement of the year.
"That was a tough vote," he said, according to an aide who was there. The closest he got to a victory lap was a little spring in his step.
Reid had tried twice since becoming majority leader to get the Senate to stand up to the Bush administration's Iraq policy. He kept senators in session on a Saturday over the President s Day weekend to vote against the troop surge, only to fall four votes shy. He tried again in mid-March to push back against the war, but saw his own Democrats sidestep.
Tuesday night he brought one Democrat back into the fold. Two Republicans joined the Democrats to defeat a Republican-led amendment that would have stripped the withdrawal timeline from the Iraq spending bill.
Even though the final bill didn't pass until two days later , the die was cast. Reid and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi held a news conference Wednesday afternoon to tell Bush that the ball was in his court. By the time the Senate passed the bill Thursday morning, it was old news.
Bush called together Republican members of the House that morning, including Nevada Rep. Dean Heller, as a show of support for his own Iraq plan. Nevada's other Republican representative, Jon Porter, couldn't make the meeting. Nothing philosophical, Porter spokesman Matt Leffingwell said. The congressman supports Bush's efforts in Iraq; he just had other work piled high as Congress prepared to adjourn for a one-week recess, Leffingwell said.
Porter and Rep. Shelley Berkley set aside their differences last week in an attempt to win permission for a floor vote on zeroing out Bush's proposed $494.5 million request for Yucca Mountain in next year's budget. They failed, but Leffingwell said their efforts are helping to alter the debate about the proposed nuclear waste repository.
"There is a change in strategy here," he said. "Most of the history of Yucca has been the not-in-my-back-yard approach. They're going after this as wasteful, reckless spending."
Berkley had her own turn in the spotlight last week when Pelosi passed her the gavel. For the first time in her five-term career, Berkley is in the majority party, and she got to take a turn leading the House from the speaker's podium, as members in the majority do.
By Friday the town was essentially deserted as members fled to their districts for the recess. Nevada's congressmen also returned home, and Heller and Porter will deliver speeches this week to the state Legislature.
Reid will be back in the state, too. But he took Friday off.
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