"We Are Showing The Strength of the Opposition to the President"

Yesterday on Democracy Now [1], Campaign for America's Future co-director Robert Borosage discussed with Rep. Lynn Woolsey the House Iraq bill which includes a firm deadline of Aug. 31, 2008 to redeploy combat troops out of Iraq.

Woolsey has been leading the effort to defeat the bill because it includes funding for the war in the interim. But Borosage made the case for the supporting the bill:

I agree [with Rep. Woolsey] it doesn’t go far enough. We’d want the troops home as quickly as we could, if we could get them there. The question is, is it a valuable symbolic vote?

Because if it passes and we get the majority, the President will veto it, and then you will have in the public, very clearly, a statement that the majority in the Congress is against this president's policy and has voted against it and is for bringing the troops home at a date certain.

And the President is standing in the way of that, and his Republican allies and those conservatives in the Democratic Party that vote with him.

I think that’s a very valuable line to draw.

It appears that line will be drawn today, as reports indicate [2] Speaker Nancy Pelosi has rounded up enough support from both the left and right flanks of the Democratic Party to forge a majority.

Click here [1] to watch video and read the transcript of the interview.