Yesterday, for the fifth time since 2001, President Bush affixed his signature to a supplemental appropriation to cover the costs of waging war in Iraq and Afghanistan and related national security programs.
There was little public debate over the merits of the $82 billion funding proposal other than some hand-wringing over the “Real I.D. Act,” an amendment pasted into the bill that establishes a uniform national identification system that many feel is a questionable idea. Other than that, the bill breezed through Congress despite some low-level grousing from lawmakers, which the Associated Press, for one, decided fit the typical “he said/she said” narrative.
In their report, the AP trots out a few Republican senators like Thad Cochran and Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist as supporters of the funding, while writing that “Democrats used the opportunity to criticize the Bush administration for its Iraq policies and for failing to go through the normal budget process to pay for the wars. Many also assailed Republicans for tacking on immigration provisions.”
That’s easy enough. Republicans say yes, Democrats say yes (the Senate approved the funding by a 100-0 vote, while the House passed it 368 to 58), but tell reporters they really mean no.
The New York Times followed the same story line, printing offsetting quotes from Frist and Hillary Clinton before sniffing that “Before voting to approve the measure, Democrats complained one last time about the use of an ’emergency supplemental’ bill to pay for potentially foreseeable military expenses.”
It’s no secret to anyone that Washington is a highly partisan place, and Congress is pretty openly waging party warfare — which makes writing stories like this an exercise in cookie-cutter narrative. And we might be inclined to accept their “he said/she said” version of the story as an accurate reflection of events — if it weren’t for the Washington Post.
The Post takes a more balanced look at Congressional opinion on the supplemental appropriation, quoting Republican Senator Chuck Hagel calling the administration’s reliance on emergency supplementals (while lowballing the cost of the war in its yearly budgets) “dangerously irresponsible.” Another Republican Senator, John McCain, told the paper, “We all know what’s being done. There’s greater and greater resistance” by Republicans to the use of supplementals. The Post also quoted a “senior GOP congressional aide” as saying the use of these supplementals “is a losing strategy.”
According to the Post, the story isn’t a purely partisan fight, as the AP and the Times would have it. To be sure, McCain and Hagel aren’t exactly known as team players in the Republican caucus, and their dismay over the president’s free-spending ways has been a thorn in the party’s side for some time — but still, the fact that there are some conservatives who are pushing back against the administration (and who enjoy being quoted doing so) seems worthy of at least a mention in any account of what went down yesterday. But instead of doing a little extra work, it looks like some reporters would still rather collect their partisan quotes and write the same old partisan story.
–Paul McLeary
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.