Anti-McCain-Doctrine legislation for dummies

It gets hard to keep track of all this stuff, doesn’t it?

When we have a President of the United States doing so many things wrong, for so long and we finally get a Democratic Congress that will actually take their oversight responsibilities seriously, well, the bills start flying faster than Dick Cheney can say "go f*** yourself" to Senator Patrick Leahy.

So let me clear up what's happening in the Senate where, at press time, we have three pieces of legislation that seek to neuter George W. Bush's ability to escalate the Iraq war.

Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA) has introduced one bill, currently cosponsored by seven Senators, to remove any funding for sending additional troops to Iraq. The legislation proposed by Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) doesn't mention money, but cuts right to the chase by simply mandating that any new troop deployment for Iraq must be approved by Congress.

Then there's the Biden-Hagel-Levin resolution, introduced on Wednesday, that more or less tells Bush that Congress is against escalating the war but, as a non-binding resolution, does not compel the president to cancel sending 22,000 more troops to Iraq.

The best way to make sense of this is to cut to (quite literally) the bottom line of these bills to see what Congress is really trying to say.