Right Side of the Rainbow

Roll call here. ABC News has this report.

Fortunately, predictions of thirty to forty GOP defections proved false. The names of the seventeen white flag Republicans:

• Castle
• Coble
• Davis, T
• Duncan
• English (PA)
• Gilchrest
• Inglis
• Johnson (IL)
• Jones (NC)
• Keller
• Kirk
• LaTourette
• Paul
• Petri
• Ramstad
• Upton
• Walsh (NY)

And the two stand-up Democrats:

• Marshall
• Taylor

In the Senate, where a test vote is scheduled tomorrow, Republicans say the resolution is DOA.

ADDED —

“The potential for a constitutional crisis here and now is real …”

Well, maybe. I’m more sanguine. True, the war in Iraq is unpopular. But actually pulling the plug on American troops in theater is a huge political risk. Were the Democrats certain it was the politically correct thing to do, they’d try it now, and not later this year as Senator Lieberman warns. But the Democrats aren’t certain. And that’s why they’re testing the waters by jacking around with improvident but non-binding resolutions.

It’s also worth noting that the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination supports the war and the surge. And the leading candidate for the Democratic nomination voted for the war and refuses to call her vote a mistake. If the American electorate thought it imperative we leave Iraq this instant, we’d hear that from Mr. Giuliani and Ms. Clinton — or else they wouldn’t be at the top of their fields.

Are the voters unhappy with the war and do they see it as a problem? Yes. But in politics, it’s almost always a mistake to conflate consensus about a problem with consensus about the solution.

Finally, which strikes you as more likely: the president takes the safe (and GOP election-enhancing) step of declaring a post-surge victory and begins to draw down U.S. troops in Iraq by, say, January 2008, or the Democrats take the risk of defunding the war? Call me cynical, but I don’t think the Democrats’ opposition to the war extends to endangering their congressional majority.

ADDED II —

By the way, the politics of today’s vote are mostly neutral. The Democrats who voted for the resolution will get nothing but the adulation of their base. We can say the same of the Republicans who voted against it. In neither case will the broader electorate punish them.

The only members likely to pay a price for their vote are the seventeen Republicans who voted “aye.” Some of them will not survive their next encounter with the Republican electorate.