Yogi Berra certainly had a way with words. This time his "deja vu" took me back about 35 years to my teaching days, And that backward glance was triggered last week by the House debate over U.S. military involvement in Libya via NATO, combined with the long running saga over federal spending, the budget, and debt. First, the context for the mental return to yesteryear. In the early l970s it was evident that congressional powers in war making and budget decisions were in sharp decline. A book written by Senator Joe Clark in l976, called Congress "the sapless branch" of government.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, yet by the early 70s the U.S. had fought the Korean war in the 50s and was fighting a major ongoing battle in Vietnam, both without a declaration of war by Congress. To give the constitutional authority new meaning, in l973, Congress passed over a presidential veto a War Powers Resolution (WPR) that required the President to notify Congress of intentions to involve the country in military conflict. And, unless Congress authorized such involvement, U.S. forces could only be used for 60 days before withdrawal had to begin, the withdrawal time limited to 30 days.
Over the 38-year history of the WPR, sometimes the President has gone to Congress for authorization to use military force such as former President George W. Bush's invasion of Iraq in 2003. On other occasions Congress was ignored such as President Clinton's military involvement in Bosnia and Kosovo in the l990s, but presidential assertion of the commander in chief role and war-making preogatives was nonpartisan. It was an institutional battle between the President and Congress. Last week liberal Democratic Representative Kucinich proposed a resolution that would give President Obama just an additional 15 days before ending this country's military participation with NATO in the Libyan conflict. The Kucinich proposal lost by a vote of 148-265 but the House then approved a resolution of Speaker Boehner rebuking Obama over the Libyan involvement without coming to Congress for authorization. It was another re-run of Congress seeking to reassert its power in war making.
As to the second issue of Congress and the budget, the early 70s found the congressional role in the budget process weak and getting weaker. The immediate issue was President Nixon openly challenging Congress on its power of the purse by refusing to spend money appropriated by Congress for items Nixon opposed. This was referred to as the impoundments issue. But while impoundments were the immediate cause of the presidential-congressional confrontation, it reflected the basic institutional weakness of Congress in the overall budget process.
The President had (and still has) a centralized process for drawing up his budget, a process that requires the multitude of bureaucracies to come to the President's Office of Management and Budget (OMB) to make the case for the money they want. From this process came a single overall budget the President submitted to Congress early each year. Congress, on the other hand, would break that budget request into a dozen or so pieces with each piece going to separate subcommittees of the Appropriations Committee. The final overall congressional budget then turned out to be whatever the separate pieces added up to. To remedy its weakened role in the budgetary process, Congress passed the Budget and Impoundments Control Act of l974.
To briefly summarize and oversimplify how it was intended to strengthen Congress, the act created the Congressional Budget Office (CBO) which gave the lawmakers their own resources for budget analysis, similar to OMB. It also established a firm schedule for Congress to follow in setting a total amount for the budget and amounts to be provided for major spending categories. The various committees and subcommittees involved in budget making were then required to fit their spending requests into these categories. The final step would be reconciling the money requested by committees in the various spending categories with the overall congressional budget target. All of this would be done between the time Congress received the President's budget in late January or early February and the beginning of the new fiscal year about eight months later, October 1.
While all of this looked good on paper and did introduce some discipline into congressional decision making, the very structured process crumbled over the years, reaching its low point just last year when not a single appropriation bill was passed. Now that process has become further mired in extreme partisan politics as well as being currently entangled in another process for raising the federal debt ceiling above the $14.3 trillion limit. So now when you hear the rhetoric of spending cuts, it is often unclear whether the cuts are related to the regular budgetary process, however fractured that has become, or the debt ceiling issue, or some of each.
But whether it be Libya and war powers, issues of taxing and spending, or the hardline partisanship, Congress, the onetime "sapless branch" of government, cannot escape the current public perception of its being the "broken branch" as a 2008 book has labeled it.
Good political lesson. As Alexander Hamilton said Governments love to spend. The accumulation of debt is "perhaps the Natural Disease of all governments. " We have two branches of government that are diseased. With a 14.3 trillion debt staring us in the face one branch has to start making some hard spending cuts. It will take a lot for the broken branch to start mending. Both sapless and broken seem appropriate adjectives though.
ReplyDeleteIt doesn't seem to me that the President should have sole power to drive the country to war. A decision such as that should certainly have a system of checks and balances.
Carole
ReplyDeleteThanks. I would bet that we disagree on which two branches that are diseased. While I'm not fully there yet, the Supreme Court has good prospects for succumbing to what used to be called lingering consumption (tuberculosis or progressive wasting of the body, according to one dictionary). One can disagree with the policies coming out of the administration, but it is able to act and make decisions. Congress, on the other hand, is consumed by partisanship and gotcha politics that makes getting final action on many things very difficult. But I also do not want a Congress that is just a rubber stamp to the President, such as was the case when the Republicans controlled Congress during part of the Bush I administration.
Part of the problem with Congress and the President on war making is that even when Congress was not consulted and Congress grumbled, it still provided the money for the involvement/war. And there is a body of opinion that says the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional.
Carole
ReplyDeleteA correction. I meant to say Bush II, not Bush I.
"A nickel isn't worth a dime today." August 2nd isn't that far away and I'm not even seeing a lot of dicussion from the media on what is happening with the debt ceiling. There is too much attention to Wiener but I don't want to go down that road. Congress seems to be up to politics as usual letting the bipartisan bickering overtake getting anything resolved. I do hope somewhere in the midst of the insanity that somehow congress can get together and start resolving some of the economic issues hurting this country.
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure I understand the constitutionality issue of the WPR. If the constitution gives Congress the power to declare war then why did they feel the need to pass the WPR.(?) They already had the power and it seems it is unconstitional for the President to go ahead and declare war unilaterally. It seems like the WPR has become pretty ineffective as President's seem to do what they want anyway. (It is better to ask forgiveness then permission)
dpchuck
ReplyDeleteWe get an occasional media report on the debt ceiling talks but it always comes down to the same thing. Right now there is talk that the target date for agreement is mid-July. The Democrats are being asked to cut or end spending on programs, many of which are aimed at aiding the political base of the Democratic party. The Democrats have shown a willingness to do this even though it really undermines the party's social policy philosophy. On the other hand, the Republicans insist on maintaining a core political part of their philosophy; that is, no tax increases. Thus, the Republicans want to put the full burden of cutting the deficit on reduced spending while conceding nothing on raising revenues. Also, the GOP wants to put medicare and medicaid reform on the debt ceiling table, while the Democrats want to deal with such reforms separately through the normal legislative process. That doesn't mean the Democrats oppose making some cuts in these programs now, only that the kind of complete Ryan-type overhaul should be considered separately from the debt ceiling issue.
One of the basic constitutional issues is that in effect the WPR is a kind of legislative veto over the President's power as commander-in-chief. Thus, the separation of powers in the Constitution is violated. There are some other constitutional issues that are raised but, frankly, they are too arcane for me to understand them. Even when a President does abide in some way with the WPR, he does so by saying what he is doing "is consistent with" the WPR rather than saying "is pursuant to" the WPR. In that way the President is not conceding his C-in-C powers to Congress.