How the Senate was bait and switched into war | Conn Carroll | Beltway Confidential | Washington Examiner

How the Senate was bait and switched into war | Conn Carroll | Beltway Confidential | Washington Examiner

An extraordinary maneuver to get the Senate on record supporting the war in Libya was apparently used by the Obama administration: adding language to a resolution without telling anyone and "hotlining" it through in late at night through unanimous consent (of a much smaller than usual Senate).

It is very rare to so blatantly breach the trust of ones fellow Senators--it is a small world in the Senate and the long term consequences of a bad rep surely outweigh any immediate advantage. And it is difficult to see what the advantage is. After all, using unanimous consent precludes getting any particular Senator on record. The only real use of the resolution would be for political cover if the engagement went badly (badly in the sense of costing a lot of American lives or giving us a Libya run by people even nastier than the ones running it now) and the decision became a negative for the President's reelection campaign. But in that case the underhanded tactics the administration used to get the resolution through would in all likelihood negate any political cover the Senate vote provided. Indeed, the President's own allies in the Senate would have the political incentives to make sure that that is precisely what happened.