As Betsy Newmark writes, "Maxine Waters reveals a bit of the truth", though rather inadvertently, of course:

In the debate yesterday over the House Resolution on the Iraq War and battle against terrorism, Maxine Waters, always entertaining, revealed the real reason why the Democrats were so upset. (Thanks to Laura Ingraham for posting the audio.) She got up on the House floor and said that many Democrats were going to be "trapped" because they would have to vote on this resolution and they don't want to have to pick a side and vote on it.

"And so, many Democrats are going to get trapped. Because they claim that in their districts they have half of their constituents for it, this war and half against it and they don't know what to do."

So in other words, if you add together to majority of the electorate that voted for President Bush in 2004, and the "half of [the] constituents" in Democrat districts that Waters refers to, the 256 in favor, 153 opposed vote yesterday sounds like, if anything, actually a smaller representation of what the national consensus actually is, despite post-voting waffling by Waters and others on the left.