Keating's businesses continued to spiral downward, taking the five senators with him. Together, the five had accepted more than $300,000 in contributions from Keating, and their critics added a new term to the American lexicon: "The Keating Five."

The Keating Five became synonymous for the kind of political influence that money can buy. As the S&L failure deepened, the sheer magnitude of the losses hit the press. Billions of dollars had been squandered. The five senators were linked as the gang who shilled for an S&L bandit.

S&L "trading cards" came out. The Keating Five card showed Charles Keating holding up his hand, with a senator's head adorning each finger. McCain was on Keating's pinkie.

As the investigation dragged through 1988, McCain dodged the hardest blows. Most landed on DeConcini, who had arranged the meetings and had other close ties to Keating, including $50 million in loans from Keating to DeConcini's aides.

But McCain made a critical error.

He had adopted the blanket defense that Keating was a constituent and that he had every right to ask his senators for help. In attending the meetings, McCain said, he simply wanted to make sure that Keating was treated like any other constituent.

Keating was no ordinary constituent to McCain.

On Oct. 8, 1989, The Arizona Republic revealed that McCain's wife and her father had invested $359,100 in a Keating shopping center in April 1986, a year before McCain met with the regulators.

 The case still dogs John McCain.

Lincoln was the most expensive failure in the national S&L scandal. Taxpayers lost more than $2 billion on the bailout.

Anyway, I think most reasonable people would acknowledge that the late SSGT Keating is hardly responsible for his late grandfather's actions. I'd offer better than even odds that he was likely asked more than once whether he was related to Charles Keating, Jr.

I had a college baseball teammate who was the grandson and namesake of a once-prominent physician and now thoroughly discredited proponent of eugenics, who back in the 1920s and '30s had advocated nationwide for the mandatory sterilization of the mentally ill.

My friend was so embarrassed by his infamous grandfather -- who had actually died two years before he was born -- that he took to calling himself by his middle name rather than by his given first name, and he further insisted that others do the same, including members of his own family.  

Obviously, you can't pick your relatives, any more than you can stop other people from asking about them.

Anyway, while a demand such as yours sounds great in theory, it would ultimately prove unwieldy and foolhardy in actual practice, were the President -- who's also, let's remember, the Commander in Chief of the military -- required to seek without exception the prior concurrence of Congress before ordering the deployment of American forces abroad for whatever reason.

The President needs to be able to act swiftly in critical situations when it's required, and it serves no useful purpose to hamstring the White House in that regard, particularly when Congress has other means available by which it can -- and should -- assert its own authority and hold the administration accountable.

For the record, in our country's entire 239-year history, Congress has authorized eleven resolutions formally declaring a state of war between the United States and another country:

• June 18, 1812 against Great Britain;
  
• May 13, 1846 against Mexico;
  
• April 25, 1898 against Spain;
  
• April 6, 1917 against Germany,
  
• December 7, 1917 against Austria-Hungary;
  
• December 8, 1941 against Japan;
  
• December 11, 1941 against Germany
  
• December 11, 1941 against Italy;
  
• June 5, 1942 against Bulgaria;
  
• June 5, 1942 against Hungary; and
  
• June 5, 1942 against Romania.

• July 9, 1798 against France (Quasi-War);
  
• February 6, 1802 against Tripoli (First Barbary War);
  
• May 10, 1815 against Algiers (Second Barbary War);
  
• March 3, 1819 against "pirates and slave traders" (Act of 1819, Relative to the Slave Trade);
  
• May 11, 1860 against Paraguay (The Paraguay Expedition);
  
• April 22, 1914 against Mexico (The Occupation of Veracruz);
  
• July 21, 1918 against Russia (as part of the Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War);
  
• March 9, 1957 against the political opposition in Lebanon;
  
• August 6, 1964 against the Viet Cong and North Vietnam (Vietnam War);
  
• September 29, 1983 against Syria and the Druze militias in Lebanon;
  
• January 12, 1991 against Iraq (Persian Gulf War);
  
• September 14, 2001 against al Qa'eda and the Taliban in Afghanistan (afghanistan War); and
  
• March 3, 2003 against Iraq (Iraq War).

• July 7, 1950 against North Korea and later,  China (UNSC Res. 84);
  
• June 4, 1993 against Bosnian Serb forces (UNSC Res. 770, 776 and 836);
  
• August 1, 2003 in Liberia (UNSC Res. 1497);
  
• April 30, 2004 in Haiti (UNSC Res. 1529 and 1542); and
  
• March 17, 2011 in Libya (UNSC Res. 1973).

By refusing to ever reference the Confederate States of America directly by name, Lincoln and Congress effectively kept the U.S. Civil War from being recognized internationally as a conflict subject to the rules of war and by 1863-64, the provisions of the First Geneva Convention.