U.S. Mission Exposes Divisions in Congress and Within G.O.P.

By JENNIFER STEINHAUER

WASHINGTON — It is a familiar pattern in a government of checks and balances: members of Congress almost instinctively criticize the foreign adventures of a president from the opposite party.

But the current imbroglio in Congress over the American involvement in Libya exposes a deep and unusual foreign policy schism within the Republican Party, driven in large part by a Tea Party-infused House whose members are more fiscally conservative, particularly constitutionalist, less internationalist and, in many cases, too young to have been politically influenced by the cold war that informed the more established members of the party.

The divisions came to the fore on Tuesday when Senator John McCain, an Arizona Republican, introduced a measure with Senator John Kerry, a Massachusetts Democrat, to offer President Obama official Congressional authorization for the Libyan operation.

The legislation is an effort to blunt a series of House measures expected to seek to cut off financing for the operations in Libya as early as Thursday.

In introducing it, Mr. McCain chastised House Republicans for seeking to end the Libya mission. “Is this the time for Americans to tell all of these different audiences that our heart is not in this,” Mr. McCain said, “that we have neither the will nor the capability to see this mission through, that we will abandon our closest friends and allies on a whim? These are questions every member of Congress needs to think about long and hard, especially my Republican colleagues.”

House members of both parties and various political stripes seemed undaunted. Representative Dennis J. Kucinich, a Democrat of Ohio, will offer an amendment to a Pentagon spending bill to deny money for operations in Libya, as will Representative Justin Amash of Michigan, a Republican freshman.

“I’m more worried that we’re sending the signal to the world that we’ve abandoned our Constitution and our principles,” Mr. Amash said. “I think public opinion has shifted, opinion within the Republican Party has shifted, and their view is clearly in the minority right now.”

On Tuesday, Representative Joe Heck, a freshman Republican from Nevada and an Army reservist, introduced a bill that would cut off funds for the Libya mission within 30 days. The House is expected to vote on the McCain-Kerry bill this week, and is also likely to vote on a measure to end all involvement in Libya.

The antipathy toward the operations in Libya stems in part from President Obama’s refusal to seek authorization from Congress for the activities, as required by the 1973 War Powers Resolution.

But the rationale against operations in Libya extends to costs — expected to top $1 billion by the end of the fiscal year — and a belief among many lawmakers that American involvement in international conflicts should be limited to those where American interests are clearly defined. “We have to get away from occupation, nation-building-style warfare,” Representative Allen West, a Florida Republican and a Tea Party star, told ABC News.

This sentiment appears to extend to some Republican candidates for president, like Representative Michele Bachmann of Minnesota, the chairwoman of the House Tea Party caucus, who has called the Libya campaign “President Obama’s war.”

The intransigence among House Republicans — scores of whom voted for a measure earlier this month, also offered by Mr. Kucinich, ordering a United States withdrawal from Libya — is enraging many conservatives in the Senate and beyond.

“Tea Party critics of America’s current military operations should look at how well served Congressional Republicans were in the 1990s by opposing intervention in the Balkans,” said Daniel Senor, a former Bush administration official and one of 37 conservatives to sign a letter to Congress on Monday urging members not to cut financing for the Libya operation.

There is a long history of both Democrats and Republicans adopting neo-isolationist views when their party is out of the White House. Democrats criticized President Ronald Reagan’s support for the Nicaraguan contras and El Salvador’s government, and fewer than a third of Democrats in Congress voted to authorize the Persian Gulf war in 1991 under President George Bush.

In the 1990s, Tom DeLay, then the House majority leader, called the Kosovo operation “Clinton’s war,” and most Senate Republicans voted against a bombing campaign in that war. Conservatives also charged that President Bill Clinton’s 1998 strikes in Iraq were meant to distract attention from the Monica Lewinsky scandal. “Sadly, this is pretty standard,” Mr. Senor said, “however irresponsible it may be.”

But the disagreements over Libya have made for some odd bedfellows, including antiwar lawmakers like Mr. Kucinich and right-of-center representatives, as well as strong Democratic supporters of the president alongside Republican hawks.

While not all lawmakers linked to the Tea Party are cut from the same cloth — indeed, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, one of the early Tea Party darlings, has much in common with Mr. McCain — the strong libertarian streak underlies some of the alliances. “This is a determined group of people who are not going along with business as usual,” Mr. Kucinich said. “They are principled and see the Constitution as being among the first principles.”

There also appears to be a generational divide. The freshman class “has come of age during two wars that were not going so well,” said Robert Kagan, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution who also signed the letter to the House. “They did not live through the cold war, and they do not have the sort of Republican internationalist tendencies that were developed in the Reagan years that was kept going through two Bush presidencies.”

Mr. Amash, 31, noted that the Afghan war had gone on “almost a third of my life,” and agreed that newer members “have a greater sense that we need to worry more about our own affairs at home and stop trying to police the entire world.”

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"The master class has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles. The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their lives." Eugene Victor Debs

Baltimore Nonviolence Center

Wednesday, June 22, 2011