Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL), a member of the Senate leadership, said today that he supported the call for a vote authorizing military action in Libya, consistent with the War Powers Act. “Under the War Powers Act, any Senator can call this question,” said Durbin on a conference call. “I supported that (during Gulf War I), [...]

I’ve noticed that some people really don’t want to call what’s happening in Libya a war, but merely the enforcement of a UN-approved no-fly zone, as if antiseptic actions like that don’t carry the same dangers or costs. Well, enforcement action or police action or whatever you want to call it, American troops remain in [...]

Megan Scully tallies up the bill from the first day of fighting in Libya for the US portion of the coalition, and the price tag was steep: With U.S. and coalition forces bombarding Libya leader Muammer al-Qaddafi’s forces from the sea and air, the cost for the first day alone of the operation was well [...]

The final roll call for the war supplemental, which passed the House yesterday without key domestic spending, is here. 102 Democrats and 12 Republicans voted against the bill, and while a few of those Republicans probably voted no because of the meager non-war spending in there (because nobody needs Gulf Coast disaster and flooding relief, [...]

The final vote on the war supplemental in the House is expected in the next hour or so, and while it may have the 289 votes needed under suspension of the rules to pass, because Republicans are likely to support it strongly, a growing number of Democrats are expressing second thoughts. For example, Appropriations Committee [...]

John McCain lashed out at Wikileaks and Julian Assange yesterday, calling for their prosecution for releasing over 91,000 field reports and documents about the Afghan war. In the same breath, he called the document release “old news.” This has been the tightrope that some in the government have tried to play with the Wikileaks release, [...]

Last night, Wikileaks released their “Afghan War Diary”, over 90,000 internal military documents about the war in Afghanistan. They first gave them to three newspapers, who simultaneously wrote stories that appeared in this morning’s editions: the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Speigel. The documents tell a story of civilian casualties, covert death squads, [...]

Just a little over an hour ago, I wrote that the likely scenario for the war supplemental is that it will be stripped of any social spending and passed, ostensibly with Republican support if they can make it as clean as possible. Progressives didn’t really have a choke point with this bill. If it couldn’t [...]

The Senate has returned to session with a curious lack of focus on what they will debate or vote on in the coming weeks. To be sure, they have a host of possibilities, but no clear path forward. The schedule for today includes a series of planned speeches and a vote on “a judge.” But [...]

This is a couple days old, but it’s worth paying attention to. The two most powerful teachers’ unions blasted the President and his education policies at their annual conventions. In particular, they decried the veto threat the President offered on the war supplemental if the House passed legislation keeping teachers in their jobs, partially offset [...]

Let’s walk through just what happened last night in the House of Representatives on the war supplemental, and its multiple implications. The House wanted to pass war funding, and a substantial amount of members wanted to tack on some social spending. Antiwar progressives didn’t want to vote for both the social spending and the war [...]