Anything to Declare?
Got an e-mail from MoveOn.org today. (I signed up around the time of the Vote for Change tour, and haven’t really participated in a lot of the organization’s activities since then, even though the possibilities for Internet-harnessed democratic decision-making intrigue me.) They’re trying to figure out whether or not to support the House leadership’s version of the supplemental funding bill on Iraq. The bill sets a timetable for withdrawal, but doesn’t have any kind of automatic funding shut-off or anything as an “enforcement” mechanism. So some on the anti-war side say it doesn’t go far enough, and want to defeat the bill in hopes of getting a stronger version. My sense is that it’s worth supporting something that even gets the notion of a timetable on the record, and that if this goes down the next version will be weaker, not stronger.
But as I’ve been thinking about this, going over options in my head and playing Armchair Congressman, it just seems that there is not an effective way for a Congress to put a stop to a full-scale military operation. People can point to precedents and clauses and delineated powers that justify a complex situation like Jack Murtha’s readiness standards, but in terms of the way our expectations and customs have involved, the closest thing Congress has is the defunding hammer. And I think that if Congress refused to fund, or even said that in X number of months they were going to defund, the president would be able to muster enough political backlash to make that a tremendously difficult thing to make stick. So I admit, I kind of gave up a little bit about Iraq – the voters had a chance to change direction in 2004, they chose not to, and 2006 notwithstanding, the next real chance voters are going to have to change direction is in 2008.
So I started to think ahead a little bit. We need to change something about our political culture if we don’t want to find ourselves in this boat again. And a big change in political culture is a long-term, aim-high, pie-in-the-sky kind of thing. So what I think would be worth advocating would be a constitutional convention or amendment to rewrite some of the war powers. I mean, we’re still pointing to the fact that only Congress has the power to “declare war,” but I believe that the United States has engaged in at least five conflicts that are popularly referred to as wars without an official declaration from Congress since the last time it declared war. (I’m counting Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and both conflicts in Iraq.) Military operations just don’t work the way they did in the 1700s, and we need a legal structure that recognizes this. There ought to be a way to amend the Constitution so that any extended military combat action that is not immediately necessary for self-defense has to have explicit Congressional approval. Furthermore, it should be explicitly stated that the Congress has the power to rescind this approval and order the president to begin an orderly withdrawal of troops. If these things were clear, debates like the one we’re having now wouldn’t be clouded by discussion of whether or not this is an unjustified intrusion by Congress into the presidential role as Commander-in-Chief or whether or not Congress has the authority to rescind an authorization to use military force. The debate would solely be about whether Congress should use an explicitly-granted power in this particular circumstance. I have a hunch that if the Iraq debate were being held on those terms, it would be a very different one.
About Dave Thomer
Born and raised in Philadelphia. Studied philosophy at Fordham University in the Bronx, where I made many great friends and met my wonderful wife. We moved back to Philadelphia, where I studied philosophy some more and became a teacher. Online and off, I'm looking for ways that we can be better citizens and build stronger communities.