Edwards defends controversial TV ad

Democratic presidential hopeful John Edwards on Sunday defended a new television ad that is controversial among Democrats and which calls on Congress to resubmit an Iraq funding bill that includes a troop withdrawal timetable.

The ad features civilians urging Congress to continually resend a funding bill to the president that calls for a withdrawal of U.S. troops from Iraq until the president is forced to sign it. It has drawn the criticism of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.).

{mosads}“He’s not in the Senate; I am. … He doesn’t have to cast votes here in the Senate; we do,” Reid said in response to his former colleague’s ad. Reid also lauded Democratic presidential frontrunners Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama (Ill.) for keeping their White House ambitions out of caucus business.

But Edwards, a former North Carolina senator, did not back down.

“The power that the Congress has to stop this war is the funding authority. They did exactly what they should have done: They submitted a funding bill to the president that supported the troops but had a timetable for withdrawal,” Edwards said Sunday on ABC’s “This Week With George Stephanopoulos.” “The president has now vetoed that bill. The way for Congress to stand firm is to resubmit another bill funding the troops but with a timetable for withdrawal.”

When pressed if the Democrats would be saddled with cutting off funding to the troops if they repeatedly pass a bill that the president will continue to veto, Edwards said, “It is the president that is running completely contrary to the will of the American people.”

Edwards also criticized Clinton’s proposal to rescind the president’s congressional authority to wage war saying, “The president has already exceeded the authority that he was originally given.”

“America is now [in Iraq] policing a civil war,” he added. “The president was never given the authority to police a civil war.”

The presidential hopeful also defended himself against accusations of changing positions on politically expedient issues such as the Iraq War, No Child Left Behind, storing nuclear waste in the Yucca mountain range and bankruptcy reform.

“Voters,” he said, “will listen to what I have to say and they’ll judge me – my character, my integrity, me as a human being and whether they think this is, as you put it, political convenience or whether it is what I actually believe. I’m perfectly happy to be judged on that basis.”