House members stuck on same old talking points

Sunday, Feb. 18, 2007 | 7:33 a.m.

WASHINGTON - About 200 speakers (and 30 hours) into the House debate on President Bush's proposed Iraq troop surge, noted congressional scholar Norman J. Ornstein made a sad observation: This was no debate, this was speech-making politics as usual.

Ornstein helped write a best-seller last year about how Congress had become broken because the legislative branch no longer conducted the oversight needed for a system of checks and balances to work.

The Democratic Congress pledged to change that, but it wasn't happening last week in the first substantial discussion of the Iraq war since fighting began four years ago.

Republicans knew they would lose the vote, so they fell back on a scripted set of arguments against the resolution, and repeated them endlessly: It was meaningless, it would embolden the enemy, it was a step toward the Democrats' next move - limiting how war funds can be used.

Democrats, confident in polls showing the American public is on their side, likewise felt no compulsion to explain the finer points of their long-view strategy for fixing Iraq.

Instead, the complexities of the war were lost as lawmakers revved up the rhetoric surrounding what is actually a simple, nonbinding resolution saying, essentially, that the House supports the troops, opposes the surge.

Nevada's delegation was not helping matters.

On the House floor, Rep. Jon Porter, R-Nev., without a hint of irony, twisted a line his party abandoned last year. Porter called the Democratic resolution "stay the course."

Months ago, as polls showed voters souring on the war, Republicans were the ones accused of blindly staying the course, despite overwhelming evidence that it wasn't working. Democrats rallied voters by promising a new direction.

"This is a resolution of hyprocrisy," Porter said on the floor. "The American public spoke in November and said we must not stay the course. I cannot support this."

Rep. Dean Heller, a right-leaning Republican freshman from Nevada, was among those nudged by party leadership to speak out as more moderate members of his party defected to the Democratic position.

Heller has given Bush's surge plan only lukewarm support, but on the floor, he bemoaned the lack of debate on the tough questions, then turned to the phrase his party uses to suggest that Democrats want to abandon the military: "The message I want to send to the troops is, I am with you." (Later, in an interview, he asked: "If the surge is wrong, what's the alternative?")

Perhaps more so than Heller and Porter, Rep. Shelley Berkley, D-Nev., addressed policy and the thorny circumstances on the ground. She dwelled on the failings of the Maliki government in Iraq and the resources being drained from the National Guard and the effect on U.S. troops and reservists.

She said she would not "give a blank check to the president for a surge when he has not given us a clear understanding of why such an increase is needed or how it will help us succeed."

As the vote neared, Democrats were proud of the daily scorecard they kept of speakers on each side, as if it mattered as much as the outcome. As of early Friday, 187 Democrats had spoken, compared to 156 Republicans.

Ornstein was left to hope for more meaningful argument in the Senate, which took up the issue Saturday. He recalled the impassioned remarks in the run-up to the Gulf War, in 1991, when members spoke from their hearts, not talking points.

"I'm not going to trash symbolism, it can have some real impact," he said of the House debate last week. But, he said, "Americans who know that it's going badly in Iraq deserve to know what lies ahead.

"They ought to know what the worst-case scenarios are if we pull out or if we don't pull out. We ought to be having serious, reasoned debates on these things God knows we've got enough time carved out."