A Clean Bill of Health?

From Politico:   

  Republicans are howling over what appears to be Nancy Pelosi’s plan to bypass the House Appropriations Committee on the upcoming Iraq war supplemental, complaining that the move will be the beginning of the end of the usual appropriations process and will further consolidate power in the hands of a speaker who already has a lot of it.

     Democrats will meet throughout the week to hash out their strategy, and they insist that Pelosi and other Democratic leaders have not yet made any final decisions about how to handle what’s likely to be the last Iraq funding debate of the Bush presidency. But Republican and Democratic appropriations staffers say Pelosi’s office is seriously considering skipping over their committee to take a $178 billion war funding bill — $70 billion more than the president wants — straight to the House floor.

     After a rocky first year as speaker, Pelosi has notched a series of victories and consolidated her power: She has worked with the White House to get a stimulus bill passed, she has raised the profile of the Olympics issue, and she has fought the president to a standstill on the Colombia free trade pact.

     Now she’s turning her attention to the war in Iraq, the issue — more than any other — responsible for her rise to the speaker’s office last January.

     “This is not just an internal power play, it is an external national power play,” said Wendy Schiller, a political science professor and congressional expert at Brown University. “Nancy Pelosi is speaker because the Democrats ran a national campaign in 2006 and their key focal point was Iraq. … The Democrats as a party have to show their base they are still trying to get out.”

     In crafting a supplemental funding bill for a war she opposes, Pelosi has a thin line to walk. Competing Democratic factions, including the Out of Iraq Caucus and the moderate Blue Dogs, have been meeting with her behind the scenes for two weeks now. House Republicans and the White House — both of whom signed off on bills that combined war spending with domestic needs in the past when Republicans controlled Congress — say they want a “clean” bill this time, one that doesn’t contain the domestic spending many Democrats say is needed to address the nation’s economic woes. 

     There have been about three dozen emergency spending bills in the past 20 years, and a handful have passed without input from the Appropriations Committee, including billions in Hurricane Katrina aid and post-Sept. 11 funds. 

     Democrats are loath to offer any public criticism of the speaker’s maneuvers because the party needs as much unity as possible on the war in this election year, but some are willing to admit that bypassing the Appropriations Committee is out of the norm.   

     But in the end, if Democrats remain unified, the GOP is powerless — at least until the supplemental reaches the Senate or the White House, where aides have already said the president will veto any bill that exceeds the $108 billion he has proposed. 

     So, we can expect a bill that will include additional spending legitimately needed in areas other than Iraq, Democrats will hold their noses while pointing to those areas, and the president will still get his $108 billion, while the war rages on. 

     Why not just vote "no" on the GOP's desired "clean bill", and push to get the hell out of Iraq? 

     Isn't that what the majority of us want, and why the Democrats took over in 2006?