Just What the Founders Feared

[Lanya]

Editorial Observer
Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War

  By ADAM COHEN
Published: July 23, 2007

The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn?t have the power to do it. ?I don?t think Congress ought to be running the war,? he said at a recent press conference. ?I think they ought to be funding the troops.? He added magnanimously: ?I?m certainly interested in their opinion.?

The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress?s side.

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.?

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.?

As opinion turns more decisively against the war, the administration is becoming ever more dismissive of Congress?s role. Last week, Under Secretary of Defense Eric Edelman brusquely turned away Senator Hillary Clinton?s questions about how the Pentagon intended to plan for withdrawal from Iraq. "Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq,? he wrote. Mr. Edelman?s response showed contempt not merely for Congress, but for the system of government the founders carefully created.

The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an ?invitation to struggle? among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.

Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23mon4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

[gipper]

This pressure on the president, Lanya, may have good effects, seeing as how it should drive him to moderation and a change of course. What I fear nonetheless is that the chorus of critics will dislodge an avalanche of problems, in Iraq, which could cascade down the mountainside and bury our morality (what's left of it) and our good name (what's left of it, too) in a snow cave from which we may never fully emerge. What I mean is this: there is no clear "right" path or solution in Iraq, the most pressing of our problems, perhaps (but remember Iran, Pakistan, Palestine-Israel, Afghanistan, Lebanon et al.). Three questions or aspects of the situation should be foremost in our thinking, much before we board the good-time express to carefree disengagement. Those questions are: 1) what is the exit strategy -- or overall strategy -- that will preserve the most innocent Iraqi and coalition lives; this is a moral question of the first order, but it has deep geo-political repercussions as to the American character. 2) Can we prevent a failed state at an "acceptable" cost, such that jihadists will not be able to establish further safe havens in this centrally-located Middle Eastern location? This question has, in addition to the geo-political effects of a US humiliation, direct security/military effects as a new base of operations would be opened by the enemy. 3) Can we prevent the Iraq strife from infecting the region, drawing more nations in as their interests are threatened by an ongoing and burgeoning civil war? This has direct geo-political and military consequences. I agree that this is George W. Bush's mess (that's where the buck should stop). But focusing on that and letting it color how we see the problems now arrayed before us is simply an indulgence we can't afford as a nation, or world. This is serious business. We should treat it as such. And I am suggesting that the Times's columnist went for the cheap, grandstand play when sound fundamentals are the order of the day.

[Lanya]

Your post requires more thought to answer than I have right now.  I just wanted to say before I forgot that there's an article I just read (where, I can't remember) about the difficulty this admin. is having keeping its eye on the ball. Due to Iraq, they say.

The number of visits to other countries that have been cancelled....these slights mount up, and it's going to take quite awhile to rebuild relations. 

[Michael Tee]

That was an excellent article, Lanya.  I particularly liked the "foetus of monarchy" phrase, which I hadn't heard before, applied to presidential authority.  I think domer was in effect changing the subject, although his issues were also important questions dealing with policy rather than Constitutional powers.  I would like to stay on the issues that the article was focused on, which were basically the usurpation of congressional war-making power by the "President."

Given that the Democratic leadership is NOT minded to bring the war to an immediate halt, the real question is how, without cutting the purse strings, the present Congress is going to reverse the presidential usurpation of its war-making power.  Since the issue is usurpation and not whether the war was justified or the occupation should continue, there is no theoretical objection to allowing the war to continue while the issue of usurpation is addressed.  (Although practically speaking, there are enormous objections to the war's continuing, that issue can be left aside for the moment.)

I would think, if Congress had the guts, they would repeal every authorization given to the President to send troops to Iraq without a Congressional declaration of war.  Although purely symbolic, it would stand as a reminder of the folly of straying from the Constitution and would provide moral support to strict constructionists in any future struggles over similar powers being granted in the future.  If and when the time ever came when Congress were to vote on an actual de-funding measure, it would make the task of casting a de-funding vote that much easier, due to the implication of the repeals that the war being defunded was if not actually illegal Constitutionally, then at least illegitimate and suspect.

[yellow_crane]

. . . . . the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress?s side.

Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23mon4.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
[/quote]



All the rhetoric surrounding the war and the dimensions of its gravitas aside, this observation is really the bones of the creature, summing up the broad lines of the dilemma.

It is up to your elected Democrats, which means it is ultimately up to you.

Clearly more and more Americans are realizing that their elected Democrats simply are not really doing much more than shifting the furniture of their staged drama, hoping to add dialogue and acts in order to avoid the final, resolving third act.

And this 'intimidation' . . . . where is it coming from, and how do you respond?

LMAO

The REAL questions are whether Lanya hates Bush, and about religious Charismaticons milking the public and how they should be lionized because one has inexplicably come to 'like them.'

Has the American public been wowsered into paying attention to the wrong dramas well beyond their own ken?

Is there any operation in America as important to the financial armegeddon of the planet and real than spin?  

One need go no further than your immediate surroundings to firmly answer those questions.

Tammy Faye, though you knowingly over-booked rooms 5 to 1, and stole untold millions from people you fingerfucked with your Shelley Winters schtick, we don't care! we still love you.  

After all, though we are beset with pesky emotional and confusions of cognizance (which is okay because television perfunctorily confirms those confusions to be okay), we KNOW that our personal sentimentalities are in perfect working condition.  

We do not know though that they are perfectly conditioned.

We do not know that we have abandoned our need for real heroes, and have instead been moved to supplant real heroes with celebrities, who are faux heroes, which is far, far from the same thing.  Heroes belong to the culture--celebreties belong to the Corporate World.

Bury Tammy Faye next to Ken Lay, I say.