Politico’s David Rodgers has an interesting piece on how an  Afghanistan War escalation might be funded. With Congress occupied with health care reform, bills that set annual spending for federal agencies have stalled (these bills were supposed to have been passed and signed by the president by Sep. 30). Which means that Obama could persuade Congress to slip in $30-40 billion or so of extra Afghanistan funding into one of next year’s spending bills, which Congress has to pass in order to keep the federal government going.

However, Democratic leaders in Congress either don’t like this idea (like Daniel Inouye, chairman of the Senate appropriations committee) or really don’t like this idea (like Dave Obey, chairman of the House appropriations committee). Inouye and Obey would prefer that lawmakers spend days and weeks debating the merits of Afghanistan escalation. In theory, it’s absolutely necessary that Congress should have all the time it needs to debate the Afghanistan War. But Congress needs to start multi-tasking here: debate Afghanistan, but also pass bills to keep the government going. It’s no favor to federal agencies for Congress to spend months on one big issue (i.e. health care, Afghanistan) while failing to also deal with, well, everything else.

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