Democrats must defund Trump’s imperial war |
Donald Trump has now ordered military attacks on more countries than any prior president. These assaults do not merely betray his campaign promises. Launched without congressional authorization, Trump’s bombings and incursions also betray the constitution – an inherently anti-monarch document that exclusively vests warmaking powers in the legislative branch in order to prevent such grave decisions from being made by any one person determined to become a king.
Trump clearly perceives himself in such royal terms – he’s said as much. But as we show in the new season of our investigative podcast series Master Plan: The Kingmakers, Trump did not create the kingly authority he is now employing. He is exercising powers concentrated in the executive branch by previous presidents and courts. And if history is any guide, the only weapon that can stop a mad king is Congress’s power of the purse – a power that Democrats once effectively wielded, but today seem hesitant to brandish, even amid a wildly unpopular Iran incursion that some fear is a precursor to the second world war.
The legislative and executive branches have long fought over the power to conduct wars. Even after passage of the 1973 War Powers Act, imperial presidents of both parties have often ignored congressional resolutions and existing laws designed to limit offensive military actions. When lawmakers have filed lawsuits to try to enforce those statutes, the courts have dismissed the cases, citing, among other reasons, the so-called political questions doctrine, which says that such matters should be fought out between the two branches without judicial intervention.
But in this era of judicial deference to executive authority, Congress’s power to limit spending remains largely unchallenged, even by some of the most hardline proponents of presidential authority, such as US supreme court chief justice John Roberts.
As a Reagan administration lawyer, Roberts told his bosses in 1985: “Our institutional vigilance with respect to the constitutional prerogatives of the presidency requires appropriate deference to the constitutional prerogatives of the other branches, and no area seems more clearly the province of Congress than the power of the purse.”
This contrast – between the weakness of Congress’s non-budgetary legislation and the supremacy of its spending power – explains why modern presidents’ ill-advised wars tend to only conclude when lawmakers threaten to use the latter.
For example: a half century ago, Richard Nixon was elected president on a promise to end the war in south-east Asia. Within........