Hill, Donnelly & Ellsworth Invested in Defeat

As everyone with a pulse is no doubt already aware, the House of Representatives voted 218 to 212 on Friday to approve the so-called war supplemental put forward by the House Democratic leadership.

It was a bill stuffed to the gills with over $20 billion in pork barrel expenditures and government waste utterly unrelated to the war itself, yet even so determined by Field Marshal Pelosi to be "emergency spending".

The only emergency was the need for the House Democrats to actually pass something, and to take advantage of a golden opportunity to evade their own pay-go rules (which don't apply to emergency spending supplementals like this one) to gorge themselves at a trough of taxpayer money.

The bill funds the very deployment of reinforcements that the Democrats only recently voted to denounce in a nonbinding resolution, but it also mandates that those same reinforcements retreat from Iraq by sometime in 2008, along with the rest of the U.S. troops in Iraq.

The bill not only demands what the Washington Post has called "an unconditional retreat," but it also puts many strings on how the money is spent, tying the hands of commanders at the Pentagon, General Petraeus, and other generals on the ground in Iraq.

President Bush has vowed to veto the bill if it makes it to his desk with the retreat mandate, the deployment restrictions, and the unrelated spending still in it.

9th District Congressman Baron Hill, like his freshman colleagues Joe Donnelly and Brad Ellsworth, joined the ranks of those voting in favor of this pork-stuffed retreat boondoggle.


Every Democratic congressman in Indiana has now, like the rest of their party and its leadership, become politically invested in the defeat of the United States in Iraq.

Not the defeat of George W. Bush, the President they so hate, but the defeat of the entire United States of America.

Hill, Donnelly, and Ellsworth campaigned on a moderate platform and spun themselves as conservative Democrats, but their votes have proven them to be anything but.

They campaigned on supporting the troops.

They campaigned on reigning in government spending.

They campaigned against growing budget deficits.

They campaigned against earmarks and pork barrel waste.

With this one vote, they have gone back on every one of those campaign promises.

They said that those campaign promises were Hoosier values, and that they would uphold them.

Defeat is not a Hoosier value.