[wordup] Just What the Founders Feared

[Adam Shand]

Great article ... after giving up on US politics out of despair and  
disgust a couple of years ago (not a good reason, but sometimes you  
can only take so much before it's time to just get on with your  
life) ... the current tide of popular opinion actually fills me with  
hope.

May it last, and may we learn something from it.

Adam.

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23mon4.html
Via: http://dubiousgeorge.net/w/?p=77

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.