This morning, we witnessed a remarkable moment in American history: a sitting President's policy castigated and condemned in person by members of a highly-respected bipartisan group -- including a former Supreme Court Justice, former Secretaries of State, and former Presidential Chiefs of Staff -- over military policy relating to one of the five or six major wars ever undertaken by this country. And to think, that group, the Iraq Study Group, was created by a tiny earmark inserted into a war supplemental bill by a rank-and-file Republican member of the House. As the New York Times put it: One never knows what some lawmaker will insert into a spending bill without public scrutiny: a remote bridge, or maybe a bike path. Then there is the Iraq Study Group, better known as the Baker-Hamilton commission. ... Representative Frank R. Wolf, Republican of Virginia, created the commission single-handedly last year when he inserted a $1 million earmark into a supplemental spending bill for the war. But why did Wolf introduce this as an obscure earmark? “The fact is that there were members of Congress who would have opposed it... Should I have allowed that to stop me from doing what was in the best interest of the country?”