Why Congress Keeps Surrendering Its War Powers

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” counseled the author of the Federalist No. 51, arguing that competing centers of power were essential to checking the growth of tyranny. However, the biggest oversight on the part of the Founders was that Congress would not willfully surrender its own power, an abdication on full display with President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. To be sure, Trump’s launching of the war is merely the latest, although most profound episode in a long and enduring trend, the entrenching of war powers in the presidency and Congress’s willful abdication of its own prerogatives. Congress’s relinquishment of its duties has come at a high cost to the American people and widened the divide between the foreign policies that voters want and what they, in fact, receive.

The chief impetus for this transformation has been the nationalization of American politics and American elite attitudes on foreign affairs. Since the end of the Second World War, through a combination of mass media and party reforms, such as the adoption of the open primary system, American politics has effectively nationalized. (RELATED: Trump Extends Iran Ceasefire, Blockade As Negotiations Remain In Limbo)

Sectional political identities and their often-particular views on foreign affairs eroded and became franchises of the national parties. As political spending and defense appropriations sloshed over state borders, the incentives for Congress changed, as representatives and senators now competed to enmesh themselves in a national political economy built around permanent wartime mobilization.

Compounding this was the growth of presidential power, particularly in war and foreign affairs. Throughout the early Cold War, Congress continually surrendered its legislative duties and allowed its oversight functions to atrophy, all in the name of national unity. In a bygone era, Old Right Republicans, like Ohio Sen. Robert A. Taft, warned repeatedly about the fiscal, social, and procedural costs of subordinating Congress to the presidency.

Despite their prescience, they lost. After World War II and later the Cold War, postwar politics stunned and eventually eliminated the Old Right’s brand of conservatism that cared deeply about the abuse of presidential power. The efforts of “Moderate” Republicans, capped by those of President Dwight Eisenhower, solidified the power of the postwar presidency as an essential institution of modern America.

Thus emerged a “New Right” that preserved the essential trappings of the progressive wartime state, including the belief that the presidency has wide, and, as many of us have argued, extraconstitutional authority over war and peace. The transformation of American governance, and thus the elimination of competing ambitions, was so total that it survived the turmoil of Vietnam, and more recently, the disasters of the Global War on Terror.

While one party may publicly fret about the abuses of the other, neither, as institutions, sincerely wants to roll back the power of the imperial presidency. Four generations into this “revolution within the form,” as journalist Garet Garrett called it, America’s political class has lost its ability to think outside of its confines. It is easier for Congressional Republicans and Democrats to complain, often about tactics rather than substance, than to do the actual business of representing the American people.

As both parties came to embrace the powers of the imperial presidency, they drifted further from the foreign policy preferences of the median American. Over the past decade, voters have consistently prioritized domestic concerns over foreign affairs. Yet Capitol Hill has shown little inclination to respond, content instead to participate in a system that renders it increasingly irrelevant.

The costs of this transformation have been steep and must be reversed if the United States is to remain a republic in more than name. Americans face mounting debt, rising costs, and economic uncertainty—and have lost a vital channel for debating the most important question facing a self-governing people: war and peace. Congress must rediscover its ambition and reclaim its prerogatives. The American people must demand it.