Daily Meme: Republicans Pick Teams on the Syria Vote

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  • Obama has announced his desire to launch airstrikes in Syria, but will not move forward with military action until Congress gets its two-cents in.
  • Republicans have already started to choose teams, although a vote is unlikely to occur before the gang gets back to work on September 9.
  • Senator John McCain leads the "We're with Obama" camp. He said today that voting down the resolution would be "catastrophic because it would undermine the credibility of the United States and the president of the United States."
  • John Boehner and Eric Cantor are also in this camp.
  • Senator Rand Paul is, unsurprisingly, against U.S. intervention. His reasoning, beyond his usual anti-interventionist worldview? "I think the Islamic rebels winning is a bad idea for the Christians and all of a sudden we'll have another Islamic state where Christians are persecuted."
  • Ann Coulter is against Obama's plan because she is Ann Coulter.
  • What about the rest of the undecided Republicans, like Marco Rubio and Paul Ryan? Here are some reasons they might decide to not vote with Obama.
  • For everyone else, Mother Jones has a pretty good primer on how the chips may fall for the many foreign-policy coalitions on both sides of the aisle.
  • James Ceaser, a professor at the University of Virginia, thinks Republicans should vote for the resolution regardless of their feelings about the conflict. "The precedent of setting too low a threshold for blocking presidential initiative in foreign affairs is unwise."
  • National Review says "Yes." If we don't act in this case, after all this windup, Iran and Hezbollah will take note of how little our admonitions to not acquire or use weapons of mass destruction really mean."
  • Which basically translates to, as Ed Kilgore notes, "you will begin to hear Republican voices essentially arguing that letting Obama hit Syria today is a necessary sacrifice in order to preserve the ability of a future Republican president to hit Iran tomorrow."

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