Plan Colombia and Beyond

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June 29, 2005

Lessons from yesterday's House vote

Our side lost again in Congress last night – a 189-234 vote in the House of Representatives against the McGovern-McCollum-Moore amendment, a measure that sought to cut $100 million in military aid to Colombia from the 2006 foreign aid bill.

The vote margin was similar to past defeats going back to 2001. Opponents of Plan Colombia did not gain ground, unfortunately – but at least we did not lose ground in the most conservative House we have ever faced.

I take three lessons from this experience.

1. Winning the debate isn’t enough. The speakers in favor of the McGovern-McCollum-Moore amendment dominated the debate. They had all the facts to show that the policy, five years and $4 billion later, is a failure. They were well-briefed, and had command of as many statistics and sources as a champion high-school debate team.
   
   They made mincemeat of the amendment’s opponents, an all-Republican team who were content merely to repeat, over and over, talking points taken from a June 27 letter from Rep. Mark Souder (R-Indiana), the über-drug warrior who heads the House Government Reform Subcommittee on Drug Policy. This letter’s points were easy to rebut, as this PDF file shows.
   
   So our side won the debate – but ended up with 45 percent of the vote. Why? Mainly because the Republican party remained in solid, near-unanimous opposition to the amendment. Only 19 Republican members, out of 226 present, voted with our side. (169 of 196 Democrats voted with our side – so don’t believe any claims that the current policy has bipartisan support.)
   
   The other 207 undoubtedly include many members who, even based on what little they know about Colombia, have doubts about the wisdom of the current policy. But the Republican House leadership, particularly Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-Illinois), who traveled regularly to Colombia when he was an ordinary congressman, and who remains a strong drug warrior, made clear to the members of the party that this vote was important to them.
   
   
2. A cutting amendment isn’t enough to convince Republican members to defy their leadership and vote against military aid. As discussed in the last posting, the restrictive rules of House debate on appropriations bills allow only amendments seeking to change aid amounts, either by shifting it from one account to another, or cutting it entirely. Several times in the past few years, House opponents of the Colombia policy have advocated “transfer” amendments, which would have cut Colombia military aid and moved it to other foreign aid priorities (such as child disease survival programs or HIV-AIDS programs). These amendments all failed in the face of an ironclad Republican majority.
   
   This year, the amendment’s sponsors decided to try a straight $100 million cut in aid, in the hope of peeling off votes from some bedrock-conservative Republicans who hate government spending, hate big deficits, or hate foreign aid in general. That strategy appeared to be paying off when the National Taxpayers’ Union voiced strong support for the amendment and sent an alert to Congress urging members to vote for it.
   
   In the end, though, only 19 Republicans cast votes in favor, and the majority stuck with Speaker Hastert. That is one of the highest Republican vote counts an anti-Plan Colombia amendment has received, and it did gain the support of Republican members known for being deficit hawks (Duncan of Tennessee, Flake of Arizona, Paul of Texas, Sensenbrenner of Wisconsin). But they weren’t enough – and they were canceled out by “no” votes from a handful of Democratic members who could not stomach any cut to a foreign-aid bill that was already pathetically small and stingy.
   
   The amendment’s backers made the mistake of assuming that the Republican Party still includes a lot of fiscal conservatives. Times have clearly changed. They won’t make that mistake again.
   
   
3. As long as Republicans remain in the majority, pressure from constituents will ultimately be the only way to get more Republican members to question the current policy. If significant numbers of voters are making clear to them that they oppose the current Colombia policy, Republican members will feel emboldened to break ranks and defy their party leadership.

   More citizens contacted their representatives about Colombia aid in the past couple of weeks than we have seen do so in years. (This year, activism was not drawn off as heavily by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, or by a presidential election campaign. Also, this year – with Plan Colombia “ending” – there is more of a feeling that a re-thinking of the policy is possible.) Look at the photo gallery on the peaceincolombia.org website to see how many cities hosted vigils in May to show solidarity with human-rights defenders and to protest Plan Colombia.
   
   However, we are still only talking about a couple of thousand calls and letters nationwide. This is an impressive achievement, but doesn’t yet qualify as a “mass movement.” And many congresspeople representing solidly Republican districts probably didn’t get so much as a postcard (not a lot of Latin America activism in Oklahoma or South Carolina.) There’s still a lot of work to be done.
   
   This sort of work won’t involve better research, better statistics or more policy wonkiness. It requires a lot more face-to-face involvement with activist groups around the country. It requires that we better articulate what we stand for, what we want to see happen, what our vision is for U.S. relations with Latin America and the rest of the world, and how our opposition to the current policy fits into it. (While it’s important to argue about hectares eradicated, for instance, we should be talking more about the lives of the people who live on those hectares, and how the United States can make the hemisphere safer and more prosperous by helping to improve those lives.)
   
   The Blueprint for a New Colombia Policy (PDF format) we and others wrote back in March was a great step in that direction, but we’ve got many more steps to take.

Posted by isacson at June 29, 2005 12:30 PM

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