Ari Berman describes a clever effort to thread the escalation-halting needle:

When he receives the Bush Administration’s $100 billion supplemental spending request for Iraq on February 5, Murtha says “they’ll have to justify every cent they want.” He’ll insist that no money be allocated for an escalation unless the military can meet normal readiness levels. “We should not spend money to send people overseas unless they replenish the strategic reserve,” Murtha says. He expects to have one hundred and twenty days to act before the Administration deploys the second phase of additional troops to Iraq. “If he wants to veto the bill,” Murtha says of Bush, “he won’t have any money.”

Seems reasonable to me. The trick, obviously, is that the administration can’t meet those standards of readiness consistent with its escalation plan. David Ignatius says Ragm Emannuel’s on board as well.

Rich Lowry sees hypocrisy in Silvestre Reyes’ apparent flip-flop on the idea of sending more troops to Iraq. Maybe Reyes had a genuine change of heart after gathering more information. Or maybe not. Either way, or especially in the latter case, this is what we call “party discipline” and the Democrats could use more of it — wayward members learning that they’d better think three or four times before defy the leadership position on key issues.

“Last year, when he was running for re-election in Connecticut, Lieberman was a vocal critic of the administration’s handling of Katrina. He was especially dismayed by its failure to turn over key records that could have shed light on internal White House deliberations about the hurricane, including those involving President Bush,” but now things have changed, and “Sen. Joe Lieberman, the only Democrat to endorse President Bush’s new plan for Iraq, has quietly backed away from his pre-election demands that the White House turn over potentially embarrassing documents relating to its handling of the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans.”

Thanks, centrists! Not only is Lieberman going to back Bush’s crazy Iraq policy, but he’s so committed to Bush’s war plans that he’ll avoid making difficulties for Bush on any other front as well. What’s more, this is bigger than Katrina. One can expect any number of document requests to come from the new congress and the White House to try to resist compliance. Insofar as the nominally Democratic chairman of the Senate Government Oversight Committee supports the White House position that there’s no need to comply, this will be a powerful GOP-friendly argument in the press.