As House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) Iraq War Supplemental Budget goes into markup in the House Appropriations Committee this week, debate continues over whether she has the votes to get the legislation passed.

The supplemental bill calls for increased troop readiness before deployment and expanded funding for veterans’ health care and hospitals. It also requires the Iraqi government to meet specific benchmarks and ultimately sets a deadline for troops to be completely withdrawn from Iraq by September 2008.

In the second half of the video below, Pelosi discusses her Iraq legislation at the EMILY’s List luncheon last week. Her plan “would change the mission from combat to training, force protection and counter terrorism,” she said. “It would redeploy the troops. It would engage in regional diplomacy, have honest reconstruction in Iraq and make the political change necessary to end the civil strife. Only then can we refocus our attention on the real war on terror which is the war in Afghanistan.”

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 13th, 2007 at 10:13 am and is filed under Politics .