[Brad]

For the most part, once Congress has voted to authorize military action, they are out of the loop. The only part of the war they have anything to do with is the funding. Other than that, all they can do is pontificate and investigate. There are a lot of good reasons for this, the most obvious being that you can only have one Commander in Chief. So once the war starts it's the administration's ball. It just wouldn't make sense to have hundreds of Senators and Representatives involved daily in making policy for war (not that they don't try.)

They have tried to interfere, for example, with our policies at Guantanamo Bay. Now, I personally don't think either that or Abu Ghraib is the national scandal it's been made out to be, but even if it was, the last thing you want is Congress in the midst of a war to be able to inject political considerations into how our soldiers operate. It's bad enough that the administration does it.

Anyway, the main reason you don't hear much from Congress about the war is that it's an area in which they are pretty much impotent at this point, and that's not a position a politician likes to be in!