President Bush and Congress continue to deny the fiscal realities of prosecuting two simultaneous wars that cost about $12 billion per month. By classifying the president's FY 2008 $193 billion war funding request an "emergency supplemental" and stifling discussion of war financing, Congress sidesteps the critical task of setting and adequately funding national priorities. By the standards set forth by the executive branch, spending requests must meet the following criteria to be considered "emergency":

1. Necessary expenditure — an essential or vital expenditure, not one that is merely useful or beneficial;
2. Sudden — quickly coming into being, not building up over time;
3. Urgent — pressing and compelling, requiring immediate action;
4. Unforeseen — not predictable or seen beforehand as a coming need; and
5. Not permanent — the need is temporary in nature

The first criterion is a matter of debate. When Congress approves a budget resolution, it sets a spending limit which appropriators must abide when allocating spending levels for all federal agencies. That Congress and the president have classified the $193 billion war supplemental as "emergency" presumes that the Iraq war is, in fact, a "necessary expenditure" — far from a consensus opinion. The allocation of $193 billion underneath a $955 billion budget limit would be a true test of the necessity of the spending, yet Congress has obviated this debate by extricating war spending from the normal budget process.

The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq fail the tests of being sudden and unforeseen. The conflict in Afghanistan has been prosecuted for nearly six years, while the Iraq war saw its fourth anniversary in March. The president has stated his intention to keep over 130,000 troops deployed in Iraq until at least March 2008. Further, continued violence makes prospects for near-term military withdrawal from Afghanistan untenable.

The classification of war spending as an emergency supplemental allows appropriators to sidestep discretionary budget limits and hence the attendant thorny decisions regarding which and by how much program funding will be reduced. Congress can also maintain the veneer of consequence-free spending by restricting discussion about the source of revenues that will be required to fund the two wars.

When a trio of House legislators — House Appropriations Chair David Obey (D-WI), Chair of House Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense John Murtha (D-PA), and Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) — attempted to throw light on the proposition that war spending is not without consequence, they were quickly sidelined by congressional leaders hoping to avoid an explicit discussion of who exactly should pay for the wars. Within hours of their proposal to charge a surtax to fund the wars, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) punctured any hope of consideration of revenue sources:

"Just as I have opposed the war from the outset ... I am opposed to a war surtax."

On the other side of the aisle, House Minority Leader John A. Boehner (R-OH) declared identifying revenue sources as "the most irresponsible public policy [he had] seen in a long, long time."

A debate about a war surtax, however, would make stark the set of options from which legislators must chose in order to continue war funding. They can pay for the wars today through taxation; they can place the financial burden on our children and grandchildren and finance the wars by taking on more debt; or they can curtail spending on school lunch programs, bridge and road repair, space exploration, or other domestic investments. Congress has instead refused to engage in actively setting and adequately funding national priorities.

The apparent erroneous classification of the president's latest war funding request as "emergency supplemental" spending has relieved Congress of making difficult spending decisions. House leadership's dismissal of Obey's call for a war surtax underscores the unwillingness of Congress to identify and debate the choices that must be made in order to continue to devote such large sums of money to prosecuting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.