A warm, hearty bowl of kudos to Sen. Feingold for continuing to push Senate debate on the Iraq War. This week, the Senate will take up two of Feingold’s bills. One would require troop redeployment and after 120 days would limit troop activities to tracking Al Qaeda, personnel security and training duties. The other requires the Bush administration to submit to Congress a plan for fighting Al Qaeda globally (wait–you mean no one at the White House has come up with that yet?) and would also limit military reserve deployment.
Getting the Senate to talk about the issue wasn’t easy: Feingold only secured the promise of the roll call vote last year after backing off a threatened filibuster of a Defense authorization bill. And sure, there’s little chance the measures will garner the 60 votes needed to break a filibuster.
But with Joseph Stiglitz’s latest projection of the war’s costs ballooning to $3 trillion, it’s nice to know that some members of Congress are still paying attention.
