Note to Congressional Democrats:

Please read this before we proceed any further. I've added a bit of emphasis. It's from a rather important document known as the American Constitution. This bit of paper very clearly and explicitly describes what you may and may not do.

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;

To raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years;

To provide and maintain a Navy;

To make Rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces

See, here's the thing. You and you alone can declare war. You and you alone can give the military money that they don't by any definition need. You can say "Yes, we'll cheerfully spend some godawful amount of taxpayers money on two years of war."

Then, after those two years, the theory is you stop, you take a look around, and you say, "Should we really keep spending our money on this?"

If the answer to that question is "no", or even "I'm not quite certain", know what you should do? STOP FUNDING SOME IDIOTIC WAR. If they run out of money (which, for some inexplicably reason they can't get of the normal DoD budget), our Army is going to give up and come home. That is a good thing.

The solution is not to sit around with your thumbs inserted into certain bodily orifices and say, "Hmmm, I'm not so sure I approve of this. Let's pass a bill saying so." Because guess what? The president knows that. The DoD knows that. EVERYONE knows that!

Really, it's a lovely gesture the same way that those free Live Aid concerts were. You're making your stance very clear on the off-chance it wasn't before (ie, poverty is bad, war is bad, our soldiers are a bunch of ignorant monkeys and maybe we should stop paying for them to shoot innocent children). But it's not doing anything. Know how much of a "difference" a bunch of concerts led by Bono did? Nothing, really. Raised awareness, maybe, so now we've got a bunch more armchair protesters clucking their tongues in disgust at the G8 countries. And now we've got a bunch of Democrats saying, "Yep. Iraq war is bad." Which they were already saying.

Can we try a new tactic? That is, don't just vote to say you don't support the war, but stop supporting the war?