White House: determined effort by Democrats to set withdrawal deadline
Iraq-USA, Politics, 4/2/2007

White House Spokesperson Dana Perino said today that "It appears they're still content to work on a bill that does not have serious plans to fund troops or make Iraq," speaking about efforts to set a withdrawal deadline by attaching it to a spending bill.

Perino added "The authors of these bills clearly do not understand what it means to mandate and legislate a withdrawal from Iraq."

Asked that Senator Reid is now saying that he's signing on to the more stringent legislation, the Feingold legislation, Perino said " There's just these shifting sands when it comes to the Democrats and their decisions. It's almost shifting so fast it's like a sandstorm. Last Thursday the Senate Democrats passed a bill that said that -- that mandated our troops leaving within 120 days from last Thursday. Over the weekend, when we said this money is going to run out in April, and he said, oh, no, no, no, they'll be fine until July -- well, then, what is it? Are you wanting troops to leave 120 days from last Thursday, or 120 days from July or whenever it is that you get this bill to the President's desk?
In addition to that, I don't know if there was polling that was run over the weekend that led them to make -- led Senator Reid to make yet another decision and take another position on this bill, but I do know is that standing with the troops means getting them the money that they need now."

Perino added " The Department of Defense has already said that there are impacts; there are detrimental impacts if we don't get this money soon. In addition to that, I saw some people wondering over the weekend why we had not criticized the Congress last year when the money didn't come by the mid-April time frame. There were some complaints, but we also knew that we were getting closer to a bill that the President could sign. What we know now is that the President has said he's not going to sign the two bills that are underway. And so we respectfully ask the Congress to come back and get that work done for the troops."

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