Just What the
Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War
By Adam Cohen
07/23/07 "New
York Times"
-- -- 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.
Copyright 2007 The New York Times Company
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