About two weeks ago, during a rare press conference, the president was surprisingly candid about what he sees as Congress’ role when it comes to shaping war policy: “Congress has all the right in the world to fund. That’s their main involvement in this war.”
As far as the president is concerned, the Legislative branch is an ATM. It has “all the right in the world” to give Bush money, but anything else is entirely unacceptable. Congress can express opinions, of course, and the president has graciously agreed to listen to lawmakers’ suggestions — “I’m certainly interested in their opinion,” he said at the press conference — but he’s The Decider and the Commander in Chief. Policy decisions are his and his alone.
As Adam Cohen explained today in the NYT, all of this is completely antithetical to what those who wrote the Constitution had in mind.
Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”
The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”
Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”
Those guys knew what they were talking about.
When they drafted the Constitution, Madison and his colleagues wrote their skepticism into the text. In Britain, the king had the authority to declare war, and raise and support armies, among other war powers. The framers expressly rejected this model and gave these powers not to the president, but to Congress.
The Constitution does make the president “commander in chief,” a title President Bush often invokes. But it does not have the sweeping meaning he suggests. The framers took it from the British military, which used it to denote the highest-ranking official in a theater of battle. Alexander Hamilton emphasized in Federalist No. 69 that the president would be “nothing more” than “first general and admiral,” responsible for “command and direction” of military forces.
The founders would have been astonished by President Bush’s assertion that Congress should simply write him blank checks for war. They gave Congress the power of the purse so it would have leverage to force the president to execute their laws properly. Madison described Congress’s control over spending as “the most complete and effectual weapon with which any constitution can arm the immediate representatives of the people, for obtaining a redress of every grievance, and for carrying into effect every just and salutary measure.”
The framers expected Congress to keep the president on an especially short leash on military matters. The Constitution authorizes Congress to appropriate money for an army, but prohibits appropriations for longer than two years. Hamilton explained that the limitation prevented Congress from vesting “in the executive department permanent funds for the support of an army, if they were even incautious enough to be willing to repose in it so improper a confidence.”
In recent years, this notion that Congress should defer to the president on all matters of war and the military has slowly become an accepted political norm. Republicans embrace it because they inexplicably trust Bush; Democrats have generally accepted it out of some kind of deference to the powers of the Commander in Chief.
But the system was designed to work far differently. Under the Bush model, lawmakers hand the White House large bags of money and then get out of the president’s way. Indeed, as the Edelman controversy reminded us last week, the Bush gang not only resists Congress exercising power, it doesn’t even want members of the Senate Armed Services Committee asking questions about exercising power.
This is crazy. We can only hope every member of Congress reads Cohen’s op-ed and remembers that they have a job to do — which they haven’t been doing.