Projo Politics Blog

The U.S. Senate Democratic “Class of 2006” — the crop of newcomers elected to the exclusive club last fall — is a heterogeneous crew, politicians who in the aggregate represent the Northeast, the Midwest and the Rocky Mountain states.

Last week they showed their common debt to the single issue that thrust them into majority control of the Senate — the war in Iraq. Led by Virginia Sen. Jim Webb, a Marine veteran of Vietnam and a onetime Republican secretary of the Navy, the freshman Democrats jointly proposed legislation that would establish a commission to investigate wartime contracts in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Whitehouse was among the freshmen who unveiled the legislation to investigate allegations of war profiteering — a topic he discussed during his 2006 campaign, noting that a future president, then-Sen. Harry S Truman of Missouri, had been involved in such an inquiry during World War II.

As it happened, the legislation went directly onto the shelf. The freshmen offered it on Wednesday as an amendment to the Defense Department authorization bill for next year. But Democratic leaders had already suspended Senate debate on the Pentagon spending and budget blueprint, following an all-night debate that ended anticlimactically with their failure to break a filibuster against a more prominent measure. That was the amendment by Senators Jack Reed and Carl Levin calling for troop withdrawals to begin from Iraq.

---