President Bush’s legacy may well be shaped for all time by the battles this season between the executive branch and the Congress – and we would suggest the phrase for Mr. Bush to keep in mind would be “use it or lose it.” He may still preserve a remnant of the relationship he wants with the United Arab Emirates and Dubai, though Congress has been in the driver’s seat for the past few weeks. And now he’s facing an incipient revolt over funding for Palestinian Authority precipitated by the election victory of Hamas, and Mr. Bush’s nominees are sending mixed signals that just beg for Congress to step in and sort it all out.

On the one hand, Secretary Rice was up on Capitol Hill yesterday testifying before the Senate Appropriations Committee. She described Iran as “the country that is the central banker for terrorism, whether that terrorism is in southern Iraq or in the Palestinian territories or in Lebanon.” Also yesterday, the Treasury department basically shut off access to the American financial system by the Commercial Bank of Syria.

A Treasury Department statement explaining the action stated, “The Syrian Government continues to provide political and material support to Lebanese Hizballah and Palestinian terrorist groups. HAMAS, Palestinian Islamic Jihad (PIJ), and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), among others, continue to maintain headquarters and offices in Damascus, from which their officers issue guidance and direct affairs. In January 2006, the Syrian Government hosted a meeting in Damascus between Iranian government officials and several designated terrorist leaders, including Abdullah Ramadan Shallah of PIJ, Ahmed Jibril of PFLP-General Command, Hassan Nasrallah of Lebanese Hizballah, and Khaled Mishal of HAMAS.”

Yet the State and Treasury departments’ criticisms of Iran and Syria for providing support to Palestinian terrorists were being issued just a day after the Washington-based World Bank, whose president is Ms. Rice’s former Bush administration colleague, Paul Wolfowitz, announced it would issue a $42 million grant to the Palestinian Authority, which is now controlled by the terrorist organization Hamas. A statement from the World Bank said the money would cover “salaries of civil servants” and the funds were coming from France, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Spain, and the United Kingdom. Even so, the World Bank’s largest shareholder is America.

Well, Congress may be slow, but it’s not stupid. Legislation has been introduced in both houses that, among other measures to crack down on the newly Hamasified Palestinian Authority, would require President Bush to “direct the United States Executive Director at each international financial institution to use the voice, vote, and influence of the United States to prohibit assistance to the Palestinian Authority” until the Palestinian Authority meets certain conditions. The Senate version of the bill has 32 sponsors who span the ideological spectrum from Senators Kerry, Clinton, Biden, Boxer, Lautenberg, Reid, and Lieberman among the Democrats to Senators Frist, Santorum, DeMint and McConnell among the Republicans. The House versions has 118 sponsors, from Democrats such as New York’s Jerrold Nadler, Carolyn Maloney, Nita Lowey, Gregory Meeks, and Eliot Engel, to Republicans such as Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, James Sensenbrenner, and Thomas Tancredo.

One would think that this is an issue on which an administration that has just had its head handed to it on Dubai would not want to be outflanked by the Congress. The next time Mr. Wolfowitz – whom we hold in high personal regard – and the World Bank get the urge to use World Bank cash to prevent the Palestinian Arabs from feeling the consequences of voting for Hamas, someone in the White House would do Mr. Bush a favor to mention congressional sentiment on this issue and ask the president to call Mr. Wolfowitz. If France and New Zealand want to subsidize the Hamas regime in the West Bank and Gaza as Hamas trains children as suicide bombers, let them do it without the offices of a Washington-based bank headed by the Bush administration’s former deputy secretary of defense. And let Mr. Bush be leading the Congress on this issue, not the other way around.