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According to chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Admiral Mike Mullen, the emergency war funding bill currently stalled in the Senate must be passed by Memorial Day or the Defense Department would have to delay paychecks beginning June 15, 2008. (web site)

But this was no last minute budget request from the Commander-in-Chief that Congress has not had time to approve. The passage of the war funding bill was not an "emergency" when it was first requested by Bush or introduced in the House.

Congressional Democrats have simply been playing politics with the measure for so long, that it has now become an "emergency" effort on a tight deadline. Even Democrat Joe Lieberman is outraged, in his Wall Street Journal piece titled "Democrats and Our Enemies." (web site)

Old Tactics, New Priorities

Remember the congressional circus stunt last year, when Democrats tried to tie troop funding to a mountain of pork, troop retreat and defeat in the Iraq theater of operations, leaving the troops without "support" until the eleventh hour while they played politics? (web site) Well, they are at it again, but this time, they have a new set of priorities.

In the Spring 2007, Democrats were desperate to establish themselves as the "anti-war" party who would bring our troops home before they can complete their mission, all for base constituents at Code Pink, MoveOn.org and similar anti-America activist groups, from whom they would soon seek funding as they head into the 2008 election cycle.

Confident that they were far from enough votes to actually force early retreat from Iraq, they were perfectly safe in attaching the "retreat in defeat" condition to the Iraq spending bill that Bush was never going to sign. Bingo -- anti-war status mission accomplished, without a single soldier withdrawn and in the end, they even gave Bush the money he needed to carry on operations.

Fast-forward to Spring 2008... After House Democrats diddled with the 2008 war funding bill for several weeks, weighing it down with more "feel-good" do-nothing pork amendments, they finally passed it to the Senate where Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Larry Craig (R-ID) stopped it dead in its tracks.

With the help of committee Democrats, they piled on an amendment that included not only billions more in unrelated pork barrel spending for democrat pet projects, but much worse. In that amendment was:

- Amnesty for illegal migrant workers

- Amnesty for illegals who had committed ID theft

- Immunity for illegals who had even stolen Social Security numbers

- Amnesty for tax fraud and tax evasion by illegal aliens as well

"No matter how one characterizes this enormous amendment, it still amounts to amnesty," Said Senior Democrat Senator Robert Byrd.

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