April 4 —  House Republicans rarely lose a vote, and they lost two this week. Democrats restored cuts in veterans benefits, arguing that American troops shouldn’t have to come home from Iraq and fight for health care.

REPUBLICANS ALSO LOST on smallpox as Democrats beat back efforts to limit the government’s liability in the stalled vaccination campaign.
       The Republican leadership couldn’t hold its members in the face of growing discomfort with President Bush’s domestic agenda. Cutting education and health care to make room for Bush’s tax cuts is tough enough. With veterans benefits, the GOP was cutting into its own core. “They’re scared to death we’re going to run the Reagan ad: ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’” says a Democratic consultant.
       Respectfully silent on the war, Congress is asserting itself in the only way it can, with its power of the purse. A small band of Republican moderates in the Senate is bracing to hold the line on tax cuts against a ferocious White House lobbying effort. The distractions of waging war have not altered the administration’s agenda. “Nothing is more important in the face of a war than cutting taxes,” says House Majority Leader Tom DeLay. And in a move closely watched by America’s foremost ally, Britain’s Tony Blair, the appropriations committees in both chambers voted to shift money for postwar reconstruction in Iraq from the Pentagon to the State Department. “The secretary of State is the appropriate manager of foreign assistance,” said Arizona Republican James Kolbe. “Bottom line: reconstruction is a civilian role.”
       With its vote, Congress placed itself squarely behind Colin Powell in his ongoing struggle with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over who controls the rebuilding of Iraq, and the role of the international community, specifically the United Nations, once the fighting stops. Part of choosing sides is personal. Rumsfeld is arrogant and dismissive of members of Congress. “He laughs in their face the same way he does with the media,” says a Democratic staffer. Regardless of party, members of Congress jealously guard their prerogatives. Rumsfeld wanted $30 billion earmarked for the Pentagon that would be exempt from congressional oversight. Lawmakers turned him down; they called it a slush fund.

       If Rumsfeld comes out of the war damaged, Powell’s star could once again be in the ascendancy. The two have been at odds over every aspect of Iraq policy with Powell on the side of international leadership and Rumsfeld wanting to break free of entangling alliances. The rift between them slowed the march to war as Powell convinced Bush to go first to the United Nations. Powell has a stronger case now in arguing for broad international support because the U.S. military is not good at nation-building. “In Kosovo, we asked for the least dangerous and most stable place in the country,” says Lawrence Korb, a former Pentagon official who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations. “We didn’t want to get in where it was most difficult.”
       Rumsfeld has taken fire for not sending in enough ground troops, but he may yet look good depending on how the battle for Baghdad goes. He wants to install a Douglas McArthur-type military government that will relegate the United Nations to bringing in food aid, and he’ll put a former Shell Oil executive in charge of Iraqi oil production. With the world already suspicious about U.S. intentions, such a move would provoke an even more hostile reaction and raise legal questions about the Bush administration’s takeover of the oil fields. Rumsfeld’s attitude is that American leadership can handle the challenge of reconstruction, and whoever wants to come along, that’s fine, but he’s not kowtowing to anybody.
       Powell is a skilled bureaucratic player and could still win by threatening to resign. Those who know him doubt he’d do it. Resigning is not in Powell’s nature. He says in his memoir that unless something is clearly illegal, you give it your best shot and then you salute. “He doesn’t realize he’s not a soldier anymore,” says Korb. “The only way to stop this war is if he resigned.” That doesn’t mean that Powell’s loyalty is cost-free. He will push Bush to make good on his promise to produce a road map to revive the Israeli-Palestinian peace process.
       There will be more clashes between Bush’s titans. Watching them in the ring is instructive for Democrats striving to develop a coherent political strategy. Rumsfeld and Powell have such stature in the country that some Democrats are kicking around the idea of a national convention where the party announces its secretaries of State, Treasury and Defense. They would run as a ticket of five. “If we put together a powerful national-security team, it will be armor that’s pretty hard to pierce around our presidential and vice presidential candidates,” says a Democratic consultant. It’s Bush’s war, but the politics belong to everybody.