Gary Hart
06.19.2006
The Judgment of History
The U.S. Senate is scheduled today to take up an amendment to the Defense Authorization bill, proposed by Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold, that sets a deadline of July 1, 2007, for all American forces to be redeployed out of Iraq. It will not pass.
It will not pass for three reasons: Republicans want to use Iraq, and its 25,000 American casualties, as an election year bludgeon against "cut and run" Democrats; some Democrats still can't bring themselves to admit their original mistake in voting for the war; and Congressional Republicans have abandoned their constitutional duties to oversee the operations of the war.
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Thinking that they took an oath to support the president rather than an oath to uphold the Constitution, the Republican Congressional majority is hopeless. But the real spotlight of history now rests on those Congressional Democrats who support sinking deeper into the Big Muddy of Iraq out of fear of Karl Rove and greater concern for their own reelections than the lives of U.S. service personnel being destroyed by roadside bombs. What will history say of them? How will they account for their own silence, their own weakness, their own careerism?
There is something in life a lot more important than holding on, at all cost, to a Congressional seat. There is integrity, there is conviction, and there is courage. History's jury will sit in judgment today on those Democrats and will find wanting those without the conviction and courage to say "enough".
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/gary-hart/the-judgment-of-history_b_23358.html