Issues Of Major Interest To You And John R. Strohm:

• The "Bailout Bill"

The biggest issue right now is the bailout.

The original proposal was 3 pages, that added up to "Trust me, give me all your credit cards and checkbooks, and write me a full pardon in advance." I've heard of exactly one defense program run along those lines, but without the preprinted pardon. Luckily, it was done by guys who really knew what they were doing, and really cared about doing it right. They built the guidance kit for the GBU-28 "Bunker Buster" glide bomb that won Gulf War I, under an impossible deadline, doing heroic things.

The bill the House voted down on Monday was 100 pages. I've only had time to skim that one; I work for a living, just like you do.

The bill that passed the Senate on Friday, the Paul Wellstone Mental Health and Addiction Equity Act of 2007 (and therein lies an interesting tale: see the Providence Journal's article on Patrick Kennedy's Unintended Role In History), was 450 pages. Near as I can figure, that's 350 pages of gingerbread, sugar coating, tinsel, ornaments, candy canes, and USDA prime pork, wrapped around the 100 pages that the House rightfully rejected on Monday.

My opponent, Mr. Conaway, did the right thing on Monday. He voted against the 100 pages. On Friday, he changed his mind, having seen something in the 350 pages of brightly-colored wrapping paper that caught his eyes, and voted for the final bill.

No one knows what the real cost will be. The original $700 billion figure was pulled out of thin air. The people who made up that number said they just wanted a number big enough to get everyone's undivided attention.

• The Iraq Situation

The next biggest issue we have facing us right now is Iraq.

Here's my take. Armies exist for the sole purpose of killing people and breaking things, when it has, finally, become necessary to do so. War should always be the last resort, after everything else has been tried and has failed.

At this point, like it or not, we are in there. What I want is a way out that won't be setting us up to have to go back in, in a few more years. Toward that end, I'm opposed to setting a hard-and-fast cut-and-run timetable. There's also the problem that soldiers generally don't like seeing politicians throw away their lives, and especially the lives of their buddies, in vain.

The Constitution of the United States of America makes it quite clear that we have a President, not a King. The difference is that a President may not unilaterally declare and wage war. That privilege is explicitly reserved, in so many words, to Congress. There have been far too many times in the last few decades where that provision has been ignored, and it is about time we cut that out.

If a war is worth fighting in the first place, then it is worth declaring it a war.