The Republican-led House of Representatives rejected a bill Friday that would have sharply restricted funding for U.S. involvement in the NATO-led Libya campaign.
The bill, which would have effectively prohibited U.S. offensive operations such as drone strikes, was supported by House Speaker John Boehner, R-Ohio, and other top GOP leaders.
The measure was defeated in a 180-238 vote. Minority Democrats voted solidly against the measure, while the majority Republicans supported it by a more narrow margin.
Earlier in the day, House members delivered a rebuke to the Obama administration by voting down a resolution expressing support for the war. The resolution, defeated 123-295, was similar to a measure introduced in the Senate by Sen. John Kerry, D-Massachusetts, and Sen. John McCain, R-Arizona.
But don't the Republicans control the House? Surely they had the votes to pull the plug...if they were ever serious about their opposition to Libya. I think it's a bad idea to be in Libya, but apparently all the time Democrats were called traitors and enemies of the state for raising much larger and more valid concerns about Iraq and Afghanistan didn't bother the Republicans in the least.
And it turns out it was the Republicans who made sure the defunding measure was defeated. Democrats did learn one lesson however: how to use Bush war era rhetoric against the GOP.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton met privately with House Democrats on Thursday to urge support for the resolution backing the Libya mission, according to a Democratic source who attended the meeting.
"The bottom line is, whose side are you on?" she said Wednesday. "Are you on Gadhafi's side, or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them?"
Not sure I approve of that in any way from America's top diplomat, that's dangerously close to Condi Rice territory there. Shocker: everybody's a hypocrite on Libya.
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