US lawmakers on Thursday voted to fund the Iraq combat in installments of just a few months, defying US President George W. Bush's veto vow in the latest tussle of a political feud over control of the war.
The House of Representatives voted by 221 votes to 205 to release US$43 billion in emergency war funds, but told Bush he must show progress in Iraq in July, before collecting another US$53 billion in financing.
"This legislation ends the blank check for the president's war without end," Democratic House speaker Nancy Pelosi said.
Bush "has grown accustomed to the free hand on Iraq he had before Jan. 4. Those days are over," she added.
The legislation now moves to the more closely divided Senate, where the split financing component appears unlikely to survive, lining up an intense round of legislative bartering over the bill Bush will be asked to sign.
The Democrat-led House had earlier rejected a largely symbolic bid by the majority party's anti-war block to get troops out of Iraq within six months of enactment.
Under-fire Bush earlier fought back hard, after Democrats gleefully pounced on signs of softening Republican backing for his last-ditch bid to surge nearly 30,000 more troops into war-scarred Iraq.
"I'll veto the bill if it is this haphazard, piecemeal funding, and I made that clear," he said after visiting the Defense Department.
Even if Bush vetoes it, the measure sets out the House's bargaining position for the final war-funding bill, which must be worked out with the Senate and the White House. All parties hope to strike a deal by the end of May.
Bush wielded his veto for only the second time last week to strike down a bill tying war funding to a Democratic timeline to start bringing home the 146,000 troops in Iraq in October, from a war which has killed 3,379 of their comrades.
But Democrats sense the president is increasingly vulnerable.
"I think this president is more isolated than any president since Richard Nixon in his final days," Democratic Senator Chuck Schumer told reporters, referring to the disgraced former US leader who was forced to resign in 1974.
Bush did make an apparently conciliatory step by saying that Democratic demands that Iraq's government meet certain political and security benchmarks made sense.
But he stopped short of endorsing his rivals' call for robust penalties should the fragile Baghdad administration fall short.
Pelosi countered: "Benchmarks without consequences and enforcement are meaningless."
House Minority Leader John Boehner, an Ohio Republican, said: "One can only describe today's proceedings as grossly negligent."
Vice President Dick Cheney, who just visited Iraq, told Fox News that the benchmarks wrangle was simply "Washington talk" and noted Iraqis surely felt more pressured to act by raging violence than threats from Congress.
CHIPMAKING INVESTMENT: J.W. Kuo told legislators that Department of Investment Review approval would be needed were Washington to seek a TSMC board seat Minister of Economic Affairs J.W. Kuo (郭智輝) yesterday said he received information about a possible US government investment in Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電) and an assessment of the possible effect on the firm requires further discussion. If the US were to invest in TSMC, the plan would need to be reviewed by the Department of Investment Review, Kuo told reporters ahead of a hearing of the legislature’s Economics Committee. Kuo’s remarks came after US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick on Tuesday said that the US government is looking into the federal government taking equity stakes in computer chip manufacturers that
Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) lawmakers have declared they survived recall votes to remove them from office today, although official results are still pending as the vote counting continues. Although final tallies from the Central Election Commission (CEC) are still pending, preliminary results indicate that the recall campaigns against all seven KMT lawmakers have fallen short. As of 6:10 pm, Taichung Legislators Yen Kuan-heng (顏寬恒) and Yang Chiung-ying (楊瓊瓔), Hsinchu County Legislator Lin Szu-ming (林思銘), Nantou County Legislator Ma Wen-chun (馬文君) and New Taipei City Legislator Lo Ming-tsai (羅明才) had all announced they
POWER PLANT POLL: The TPP said the number of ‘yes’ votes showed that the energy policy should be corrected, and the KMT said the result was a win for the people’s voice The government does not rule out advanced nuclear energy generation if it meets the government’s three prerequisites, President William Lai (賴清德) said last night after the number of votes in favor of restarting a nuclear power plant outnumbered the “no” votes in a referendum yesterday. The referendum failed to pass, despite getting more “yes” votes, as the Referendum Act (公民投票法) states that the vote would only pass if the votes in favor account for more than one-fourth of the total number of eligible voters and outnumber the opposing votes. Yesterday’s referendum question was: “Do you agree that the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant
Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) yesterday visited Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC, 台積電), as the chipmaker prepares for volume production of Nvidia’s next-generation artificial intelligence (AI) chips. It was Huang’s third trip to Taiwan this year, indicating that Nvidia’s supply chain is deeply connected to Taiwan. Its partners also include packager Siliconware Precision Industries Co (矽品精密) and server makers Hon Hai Precision Industry Co (鴻海精密) and Quanta Computer Inc (廣達). “My main purpose is to visit TSMC,” Huang said yesterday. “As you know, we have next-generation architecture called Rubin. Rubin is very advanced. We have now taped out six brand new
RSS