A bunch of Republican House members sent a note to Nancy Pelosi, the Speaker of the House:

Dear Speaker Pelosi:

We are writing to urge you to call the House back into session immediately so that Congress can finish its work on the emergency legislation to fund the Global War on Terrorism [sic]. This funding request has been pending since February 5, but your leadership team chose to leave town for more than two weeks rather than completing this bill. As a result, our troops have been put at risk.

We are especially troubled by the House’s failure to appoint conferees. The Senate appointed conferees on March 29, moments after passing its bill, but the House never did so, despite passing its bill a week earlier. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid told the Senate that he hoped the House-Senate conference would begin on March 30. That hoped-for progress has been thwarted by your failure to act.

So the complaint is that the Speaker took Passover/Easter week off instead of pushing a bill to the president, a bill that Bush has already said that he intends on vetoing. A far as putting troops at risk, the Pentagon has already said that they have enough money to last until the summer so this bill not being sent to the president doesn’t put anyone at risk. According to Bush and the Republicans, the bill is taking too long (58 days) to get to the President’s desk, but the Republicans took 125 days last year. According to Bush and the Republicans, the bill has too much pork, but last year’s bill was loaded with pork including a bridge to nowhere for Alabama and farm subsidies.

So the question is, if this bill is so important to Representatives Mitch McConnell, John Cornyn, Trent Lott, John Kyl, Kay Bailey Hutchison, John Boehner, Roy Blunt, Adam Putnam, and Eric Cantor, if they really believe that delaying this bill puts our soldiers at risk will they pressure the president to sign it even though Bush says he will veto it?

 

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