...and here's something else the Democrats could have tried.

All the bills which have provided funding for the Iraq war have often been referred to as "blank checks." One reason for that is that never has the Pentagon or any other part of the Bush administration been required to account for how the money was spent. As a result, we do not know how the money was spent. Moreover, giving Bush a blank check now means we don't even know if the money will be spent to fully "support the troops." As shown in the previous post, Bush damn sure doesn't want more money going to the troops and their families directly, so where is it going? I guess we will never really know for sure.

So why didn't the Democrats write a bill that merely proposed that after a given time Bush would be required to give some sort of itemized list showing how the money had been spent? I'm not talking about some sort of list saying how the money had to be spent. I'm not talking about putting restrictions on how the money could be spent. All I am talking about is an explanation after the fact of how the money was spent. That would not restrict anyone's discretion and flexibility in determining how to spend the money. That would not put any preconditions on how to use the money. All it would do is require an accounting of what was done with the money. What in the world is wrong with that? Why would anyone object to that? I'm not sure, but maybe Bush doesn't want us to know where the money has gone.

In any event, the Democrats could have tried this "accounting" measure, and if Bush had vetoed that, it certainly would have looked suspicious, and maybe the Democrats could have said something along the lines of "Bush wants the money to go to companies like Haliburton instead of the troops. We just want to make sure that the money went to support the troops in the best way possible and so we could know better how to support them in the future." Instead, they chose to do basically nothing and then give in to everything Bush wanted from the start. Maybe they will consider a few more options when this whole funding issue comes around again by September. Of course they will also need to find some spines by then as well.