AUGUSTA – Congress is back at work in Washington this week after the August recess, and Maine’s delegation says there is a lot to do with one issue overriding all the others – the war in Iraq.

“Iraq is going to command center stage,” said Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, “in the aftermath of the GAO report and the report of General [David] Petraeus on September 15.”

Snowe was one of the co-sponsors of the audit ordered by Congress last spring. The GAO report concluded that Iraq had met only three of 18 benchmarks lawmakers had set.

“We should have completed work on the Defense Authorization bill before we went on recess and reached a consensus on what we should do in Iraq,” she said.

U.S. Rep. Michael Michaud, D-Maine,

said Mainers throughout his district have made it clear they want Congress to take action to end the combat role of the United States in Iraq.

“When are our men and women going to come back from Iraq? – that has been a big issue on a lot of people’s minds,” he said.

But Michaud said his constituents also have expressed concern that those who have fought and been wounded in the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan are not getting the care and treatment they deserve. He said unlike the Vietnam War, people are making a distinction between the war and the warriors.

“They want us to make sure that our veterans are taken care of,” he said. “We have increased funding for the Veterans Administration in the House, but the Senate has not acted on the budget for the Veterans Administration so we can go to a conference and get a final budget passed.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the Defense Authorization bill is her top priority as Congress reconvenes because of its importance to national defense and because it will set policy on Iraq. She said constituents have made it very clear that they are not happy with current policies and want a change.

“I want to see a full and fair debate on Iraq with the alternatives that many of us are working on a bipartisan basis brought forward,” she said.

Collins said in addition to settling Iraq policy, there are a number of spending bills and authorizing measures that need to be completed. She said after the Defense Authorization bill is completed, the Senate needs to act on defense spending. The House has already passed its version of the Defense appropriations bill.

“I also have as a priority the re-authorization of the SCHIP program, the State Children’s Health Insurance Program,” Collins said. “It is a vital program for low-income children in Maine, and the Senate and house bills are very different.”

U.S. Representative Tom Allen, D-Maine, said resolving Iraq policy will be the defining issue for this Congress. He said Mainers have made it clear to him that the current policy needs to be changed, and he said his visit to Iraq last month reinforced that need.

“How are we going to bring our engagement, our involvement in what is now a civil war to an end,” he said, “and the answer is that it has got to be some form of deadline by which we will bring our troops home.”

Allen said while Iraq is the overarching issue before Congress, many other issues need to be settled before the session ends this fall. He said that while the House has passed several spending bills, they need to pass all their spending bills and then work out any differences with the Senate in conference committees.

“I have several bills I am working on,” he said. “The comparative effectiveness legislation that I have been working on for several years is part of the SCHIP bill passed in the House. That would authorize $3 billion over five years to do comparative effectiveness studies of prescription drugs and medical devices that treat the same condition.”

Allen is convinced the studies will result in savings throughout the health care system.

All four members are hopeful Congress will complete its work this fall and not repeat the extensions that kept the session going into December last year.”We should pass the spending bills and not repeat the continuing resolutions we had last year,” Snowe said. “It was February, of this year, before the last of the spending bills were completed. That should not be allowed to happen again, and I hope it won’t.”