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President Bush has taken the war in Iraq too far. Without any checks on his power, he has simply thrown troops at a bad situation that isn’t improving. Now Congress is finally moving to take back the control that the president has abused.

The Senate Judiciary Committee met Tuesday to consider cutting funding for the war. Sen. Russell Feingold, D-Wis., said he would seek to stop funding the war after six months, except for limited funding that would go to counterterrorism and training Iraqi police.

Basically, Congress would take back control from the president with an ultimatum: Be out in six months. Period.

This power grab makes a lot of sense for a lot of reasons. First, the 2006 midterm elections – in which candidates could win Senate seats simply by being against the war – served as a strong message that America wants out of Iraq.

In addition, the president has a dismal 30 percent approval rating (according to a Newsweek poll), 70 percent of Americans disapprove of the president’s handling of the war (ABC News/Washington Post poll), only 35 percent of military members approve of Bush’s handling of the war (Military Times poll), and about 80 percent of the Senate disagrees with a troop surge (Senate Foreign Relations Committee chairman).

Clearly the president does not have much support. It’s time for Congress, with the clear support of the American public and the soldiers in Iraq – not to mention the Iraqis, who also don’t want us there – to rein in the president.

While getting some representative government involved in the Iraq war is the right way to go, the six-month deadline might be too optimistic. The U.S. has been the main force trying to keep order in Iraq for the last four years, and to expect a smooth exit in six months is unrealistic.

Instead, Congress should give the president a deadline of one year to give the military enough time to enact a more orderly transfer of power. The idea shouldn’t be to cut and run, but to transfer the responsibility onto the Iraqi government, where it belongs.

The few supporters of a troop surge in the Senate have said that cutting funding would make the wrong statement.

“The message to our troops is that we no longer support them,” Sen. Orrin Hatch, R-Utah, told The New York Times.

But when the troops want the war to be over, supporting them should be getting them out – not entrenching them further.

Congress has done little more than announce its opposition until now, despite having bipartisan support from a large majority of the Senate. Recently, a group of senators announced a nonbinding resolution against the troop surge that called for more diplomacy. But a nonbinding resolution is not going to deter the president from his chosen course.

Congress has a responsibility to the American people to represent their will, and it has a right, according to many legal experts, to intervene in times of war.

“The same duty commanders have to the president, the president has to elected representatives,” Louis Fisher, an expert in constitutional law for the Library of Congress, told the Times.

The meaning of this statement is something the president has continually ignored: He is bound by the will of the American people. He has shown time and again that he doesn’t care about the people’s will, and it’s about time Congress set him straight.

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