Selective Democrat Outrage Over Emergency Funding

The Democrats have been making a lot of political hay out of the fact that the funding for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan aren’t included in the budgeting process.  Rather, those military operations are funded through emergency appropriations requested by the President and passed by Congress.  The reasoning for this, and the wisdom in humble estimation, is that it allows for flexibility in funding the wars.  Rather than appropriating money for those campaigns just once a year in one lump sum we fund the wars multiple times a year with amounts more tailored to what is actually needed on the ground.  Also, appropriating the funds outside of the budgeting process allows the funding our troops need to avoid the delays and political nit-picking inherent to passing a national budget.

When this nation is at war it is in our best interest, and the best interest of our troops, to expedite war funding.  The emergency appropriation process allows us to do that, and I’d suggest that the Democrats only want to include war funding in the budgeting process so that it is easier for them to inhibit it (and thus undermine the President’s ability to prosecute the war) without directly voting against the funding itself.

But whatever.

Because war funding is appropriated outside of the budget process the Democrats accuse the Bush administration (as chief Democrat “budget hawks” Sen. Kent Conrad and Rep. John Spratt did recently) of “hiding” Iraq war funding.  As though the war appropriations bills didn’t go through the full rigors of Congressional debate and extensive media coverage.  But what’s interesting is that while the Democrats complain about war funding being outside the budget they certainly don’t shy away from attaching funding for their little pet projects to the war appropriations bills.

Senator Conrad himself is guilty of that after trying last year to attach several billion dollars in agriculture aid on to a war appropriations bill, and now Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi are busy trying to attach some $745 million in entitlement funding to the President’s most recent request for war funding.

The President has opposed attaching non-war related funding to appropriations bills for Iraq and Afghanistan, and in this instance his opposition has (as you might have predicted) resulted in headlines like ”Bush slashes aid to poor to boost Iraq war chest” from the liberal media.

Liberal media spin aside, however, one wonders how the Democrats reconcile their distaste in funding the war in Iraq with emergency appropriations with their love of attaching additional, non-related appropriations to that war funding.  I mean, if they want Iraq war funding in the budget they should want things like agriculture aid and health entitlements in the budget too, right?

One can only conclude that the Democrat opposition to the emergency war appropriations has more to do with partisan politics and undermining the war effort than any real concern about budgeting.