Most of them tried to wriggle out of it, noting what a great choice there was, pledging support to all of them, blah, blah, blah.
"Members and associate members" presumably means brothers and pledges, respectively; although we don't know for certain whether there were pledging activities involved.
"There is pledge fatigue," said Representative Jeff Fortenberry of Nebraska, who signed the Norquist pledge when he first ran for office in 2004 but has since jettisoned his support.
And even if the money is pledged, there is no cast-iron guarantee that it will actually materialise.
There are pledges to fulfill, dollars to deliver and lives to save.
"The programme received funding in 2015 and there are pledges for 2016 from countries.
And for the Americans, there were pledges from their European and Japanese counterparts that they would work hard to increase their role in ensuring global prosperity.
There were pledges to diversify supplies, and support for named projects like the Nabucco pipeline that would bring Caspian gas to central Europe, bypassing Russia.Accommodating a Russian bearBut most of these promises were hollow.
Apart from a commitment to localism, there are pledges to, for example, treat hard drug use as a health issue, rather than a crime issue, and to free up the release of government information.
In the security area, there were pledges of harmony in October when Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates visited Beijing, but China reacted to the subsequent sale of missiles to Taiwan by canceling permission for a Thanksgiving shore leave in Hong Kong for sailors on the American aircraft carrier Kitty Hawk.
