Apparently, somewhere about half* of Republicans in Congress follow @redstate on Twitter, so there’s a decent chance that they’ll see this advice. Anyway, I’ve been banging a drum on this issue all weekend, but I’ll bang it again: vote your conscience. Don’t feel pressured to vote against intervention, for intervention, for a different kind of intervention than the one you favor, or any other combination or scenario. There’s a reason why Speaker John Boehner signalled that he hopes other caucus members will vote to authorize, or why House Majority Leader Eric Cantor only intends to vote for intervention: they’re not going to whip the vote, and there’s not going to be a push to rush the process.
So don’t rush into this, and vote for what you think is the best, or more likely the least bad, option.
Moe Lane (crosspost)
PS: As I noted here, I don’t actually know what the best option is. Every one of them ends poorly.
*The exact number is 51.5% of all Republicans with ‘official’ Twitter accounts. Apparently 97% of all Congressmen have Twitter accounts, so it’s safe enough to say that about half of the GOP members of Congress are at least monitoring RedState.
Heh. Vote “Present”.
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Mew
AFAICT, there’s no reason to involve ourselves.
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The current regime is a client state of Iran. We want them to lose.
The rebels are largely wahhabi or salafist. We want them to lose.
Both sides of the conflict are our open and unapologetic enemies. And they’re quite happily slaughtering each other.
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Our interests in the region are the free flow of oil at market prices, and the continued existence of Israel.
Neither side winning advances our interests.
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Now, we *could* take advantage of the situation. But doing so would require a degree of ruthlessness that’s extremely unlikely in an American President (not to mention the ability of Congress to check such grand designs).
Concur… and I don’t think the current batch of idiots could manage it without badly tipping our hands to the Russians.
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Remember, Iran is their “client state”… and we really *really* want to not kill the next Franz Ferdinand.
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Mew
I would vote no but my advice to the Republicans would be to force the neo-progs to vote their hypocrisy before they vote their conscience.
There can be no conclusive proof of who did what as both sides in Syria have access to Sarin.
They played politics with Syria when they should have made the case.
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I’ve no problem getting them on the record as voting *for* war… especially with 2014 around the corner.
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If Boehner has a problem with it .. {copulate} him.
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Mew
Boehner is playing it cute. The House leadership is voting Yes but each individual member is on his own. Let Obama lobby them as he really needs the practice.
My advise is simple. Make every democrat fall on their sword and vote yes before a single republican votes
Exactly, although if they go to a roll-call vote, “present” has the same effect… it can’t pass unless a lot of Dems – who will then be vulnerable to a challenger stealing pages from their 2004/2006/2008 playbook – vote “Aye”.
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Mew