By Christopher Wilson
April 29, 1999
Washington - In a stinging blow to President Clinton's foreign policy and the U.S.-led NATO bombing of Yugoslavia, a House of Representatives resolution authorizing air strikes failed to pass as a deadlocked vote showed deep opposition to American involvement in the war.
The resolution, sponsored by Democrats, foundered when 213 representatives voted for it and 213 voted against, with 26 Democrats breaking ranks to oppose the motion. Thirty-one Republicans voted in favor of air strikes. The nonbinding resolution could have passed with a simple plurality. The Senate voted last month to support air strikes. The House has no mechanism for resolving tie votes.
The vote, which came five weeks after the NATO bombing campaign began in an attempt to force Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic to withdraw Serb forces from war-ravaged Kosovo, showed the bitter divisions among both Republican and Democratic lawmakers on American participation in the war.
``I want a note for the record that this was a bipartisan vote on both sides of the question,'' said Doug Ose, a California Republican. ``There were more Republicans voting in favor of the resolution than there were Democrats voting against it.'' The White House, which was dealt a clear blow by the vote, vowed to continue its strategy in the Balkans.
``We're going to continue to prosecute the air campaign. We're going to continue to intensify it, and we're going to continue to deliver day-by-day a punishing blow to (Milosevic's) military,'' David Leavy, the National Security Council spokesman, said.
But some Democrats seemed despondent. ``Having turned down our obligation to support troops, I just find the way this institution has approached this to be mind-boggling,'' said David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat. ``Never have I seen our national interests left in the dust as I have today.''
The vote came at the end of a full day of intensive debate in which the House also voted to block funding for the deployment of American ground troops in the conflict unless Clinton first gained congressional approval.
Although Republican leaders in Congress are enthusiastically planning to double Clinton's own request for $6 billion to finance the war, the House voted 249 to 180 to bar funding for ground forces in Kosovo unless they were specifically authorized in advance by Congress.
The message Congress sent after the debates was twofold, said Florida Republican Tillie Fowler, who co-sponsored the funding resolution. ``One was to the President of the United States that whenever you're going to send our young people into harm's way, you need to come to this Congress ... and you need to go to the American people,'' she said. ``The second is that we do have a democracy at work. Our forefathers were so wise.''
Others reinforced part of that message. ``Let's not put our young men and women ... in the position where they are on the ground under fire and the president is consulting with the Congress of the United States after the fact of their being in harm's way,'' said House Majority Leader Dick Armey of Texas.
The House, plainly worried by the escalating war and haunted by the specter of Vietnam, voted not only to restrict Clinton's ability to commit ground forces but also considered a grab bag of related proposals designed to press the president to consult fully with Congress on the war.
``Many of us believe that we should have a congressional vote before sending in ground troops. But this amendment ties the hands of our military commanders and could leave the bordering nations, more than a million refugees and thousands of our own soldiers dangerously exposed,'' said David Bonior of Michigan, the second-ranking Democrat in the House.
Clinton, striving to align a diverse array of attitudes among lawmakers with his policy on Yugoslavia, met for the fourth time with key congressional Republicans and Democrats, urging them to swiftly approve emergency military spending for Kosovo and to ``resist the temptation to add unrelated expenditures,'' such as a pay rise for the military.
Complicating Wednesday's debate in the House were two proposals by California Republican Tom Campbell that sought to force Congress to choose between formally declaring war against Yugoslavia or withdrawing U.S. forces from the Balkans. Both the proposals were rejected after being forced to a vote by the full house under provisions triggered by the 1973 War Powers Act, a piece of Vietnam-era legislation.
Clinton denounced the Campbell proposals. ``I stressed that the 19 NATO allies are speaking with a single voice. America must speak with a single voice as well,'' he said. Many lawmakers agreed that by insisting on invoking the War Powers Act, Campbell had muddied the waters on U.S. policy.
``We now have four conflicting, contradictory, mutually exclusive resolutions, with each of them given one hour of debate. With all due respect, I think this is an outrage,'' said Tom Lantos, a Democrat from California.
Many Republicans have been critical of the Clinton administration's strategy in prosecuting the war, and demands have grown that that the president clearly spell out America's objectives before committing soldiers.
``The choice really is a ground war or stopping the involvement now,'' Campbell said. ``We did not undermine anything. The president had no authority to put American troops in without consulting with Congress. ... He needs to come to us first.''
