Washington ? Senior House Democrats, seeking to placate members of their party from Republican-leaning districts, are pushing a plan that would place restrictions on President Bush’s ability to wage the war in Iraq but would allow him to waive them if he publicly justified his position.

Under the proposal, Bush would also have to set a date to begin troop withdrawals if the Iraqi government fails to meet benchmarks aimed at stabilizing the country that the president himself laid out in January.

The agreement is an attempt to bridge the differences between anti-war Democrats, led by Rep. John P. Murtha, D-Pa., who have wanted to devise standards of troop readiness strict enough to force Bush to delay some deployments and bring some troops home, and Democrats wary of seeming to place restrictions on the president’s role as commander-in-chief.

The legislative jujitsu in the back rooms of Capitol Hill underscores the difficulties the Democrats face in confronting the issue that helped them regain control of Congress – Iraq. While Democrats passed a resolution in February opposing Bush’s deployment of 21,500 additional troops to Iraq, Murtha’s proposal to go a step further by restricting deployment to troops deemed to be adequately trained and equipped elicited a fierce response from Republicans while dividing the Democratic caucus.

The new plan would demand that Bush certify that combat troops meet the military’s own standards of readiness, which are routinely ignored. The president could then waive such certifications if doing so is in “the national interest.”

Democrats hope the waiver and benchmark proposals, whose details were confirmed by aides and senior Democrats close to the House Appropriations Committee and leadership, will keep the policy-making responsibilities on Bush. That should allow the committee to move forward next week with a $100 billion war spending bill.

“They’re going to end up where they should have started a long time ago: You set readiness requirements, time-in-country requirements, time-in-rotation requirements as policy, then grant the president waivers and demand why it’s so important for him to violate these principles,” said a senior Democrat close to the appropriations committee. “It’s all part of military regulations now. You have to elevate that to the policy of the country.”

But any dilution of Murtha’s original proposal is likely to infuriate the anti-war wing of the party that wants dramatic action now. After a conference call Monday, anti-war and labor groups all but gave up on Murtha’s approach, concluding they could only support a war-funding “supplemental” bill if it contains a deadline for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Participants – including the Service Employees International Union, MoveOn.org, Win Without War and the Iraq veterans group VoteVets – insisted there would be more support for a straightforward approach to ending the war than the roundabout efforts championed by Murtha.

“A timeline will make a vote for the supplemental a vote to end the war and a vote against it a vote for war without end,” said Tom Matzzie, Washington director of MoveOn.org Political Action.