California Conservative

Hooray for the GOP House leadership for firing off this letter to Nancy Pelosi telling her that she needs to reconvene the House so they can pass a clean supplemental appropriation bill for funding the troops in Iraq.

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

We are writing to urge you to call the House back into session immediately so that Congress can finish its work on the emergency legislation to fund the Global War on Terrorism. This funding request has been pending since February 5, but your leadership team chose to leave town for more than two weeks rather than completing this bill. As a result, our troops have been put at risk.

I really like that opening. It lays out what’s at stake in a firm, respectful way. It also puts the onus squarely on Ms. Pelosi’s shoulders by telling the American people that Pelosi’s Democrats didn’t take their responsibility for funding the troops seriously.

We are especially troubled by the House’s failure to appoint conferees. The Senate appointed conferees on March 29, moments after passing its bill, but the House never did so despite passing the bill a week earlier. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the Senate that he hoped the House-Senate conference would begin on March 30. That hoped-for progress has been thwarted by your failure to act.

This paragraph expands on the opening paragraph in the sense that they’re saying that Ms. Pelosi didn’t name conferees, which is the minimum threshold for getting the troops funded. Finally, there’s this paragraph:

It should go without saying that our military leaders are in the best position to know the needs of our troops, and they have left no doubt that this funding is needed urgently. General Peter Schoomaker, United States Army Chief of Staff, has written that, “without approval of the supplemental funds in April, we will be forced to take increasingly draconian measures which will impact Army readiness and impose hardships on our Soldiers and their families.”

In other words, Secretary of State Pelosi and Joint Chief of Staff Chairman Murtha think that they know better than Gen. Petraeus and Gen. Schoomaker. That’d be laughable if it weren’t such a serious matter.

Technorati Tags: Nancy Pelosi, Supplemental Spending, John Murtha, David Petraeus, House of Representatives, Defeatocrats, Iraq War, Military

Cross-posted at LetFreedomRingBlog

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 10th, 2007 at 1:50 am and is filed under Author: Gary Gross, Election 2008, Iraq, Military, Pelosi, Terrorism, W. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.