No money for Trump’s folly

My congressional representative Adam Smith is not exactly a leading-edge firebrand, which makes this interview with Greg Sargent all the more encouraging. First, this is the right answer about whether the war is justified:

Well, a couple of layers to this. First of all, the idea that there was any sort of imminent threat from Iran is just ridiculous. There’s no evidence whatsoever that Iran was anywhere close to getting a nuclear weapon or ready to attack. So the notion that we had to do this because of an imminent threat is completely wrong. I mean, Iran is as weak as it’s been in over a decade.

This is also the right answer on funding, and hopefully he’s right about the rest of the caucus (or at least the non-Fetterman parts):

It’s going to be very tough to get it through. I think all Democrats should oppose it. I mean, I’ll oppose it for no other reason than I oppose this war and I want this war to stop. But look—you want to know something really funny? You know what Congress tried to pass yesterday in the House? A balanced budget amendment. The Republican House put that out—I mean, I’m not often speechless, but I’m close to speechless trying to explain that. So there will be some Republicans who will say, Gosh, we can’t do this, it’s too expensive and all of that. But you know the pattern—they say it, and then at the end of the day, they do whatever Trump asks them to. So how many Republicans will actually oppose it? I don’t know.

Might there be a couple of Democrats who support it? One of the arguments is, well, even if you don’t support the war, we’ve gone to war, we’ve done it—don’t we have to pay for it? You know, forgive me, but fuck that. OK. If you want to pay for it, I’m going to raise taxes. You want to raise taxes? I can have that conversation. The idea that we’re going to dig into the rest of the budget—we’re cutting Medicaid, food stamps, we’re cutting all of these programs—and then we’re going to pull $200 billion aside on top of a $1.5 trillion defense budget? Hell no. No Democrat should vote for this. And I hope the Republicans who care about fiscal responsibility will stand up and say no. But it’s a tough call. And then you get into the whole 60 votes in the Senate—did they get rid of the filibuster? I think it’s going to be really difficult to pull through this amount of money.

This is a Republican war, it is a disaster on every level, and they need to own it wholesale. This is not a complicated question.