The framers’ wisdom in vesting constitutional control over the war power—its “commencement, continuation and conclusion”—in Congress, as James Madison said, not in the hands of the president, has struck Americans squarely in the face in light of President Donald Trump’s fly-by-the- seat of his pants conduct of his war in Iran, one characterized by tactics without strategy and occasional public pronouncements that, like the mercurial summertime weather, can change from minute to minute. Trump’s arbitrary Truth Social Posts, designed to manipulate the financial markets, are a reflection what his former aide, Steve Bannon, once called his approach to governance—“just win the next five minutes.” They leave Americans to guess at this president’s strategy, goals and end game—if Trump even has any— in his initiation of a war of choice, which currently costs the United States over $ 1 billion per day, in addition to his request to Congress for an additional $200 billion dollars. All this for something he absurdly calls an “excursion.”
Trump’s war of choice has sent energy prices soaring, disrupted the world’s oil supply and threatens global economic disruption. He has lifted the sanctions on Iranian oil, which has increased the enemy’s revenue and thus its capacity to fight Americans, and removed the sanctions on Russian oil, which has lined Putin’s pockets so he can increase his war of choice in Ukraine.
There were eminently sound reasons—as compelling today as they were in 1787— behind the framers’ historic decision to grant to Congress, as Madison declared, the entire control over the decision to go to war, to move the nation, as Alexander Hamilton said, from a “state of peace to a state of war.” In breaking with the historical pattern of executive warmaking, the framers sought to avoid the arbitrary executive decisions that kings, despots and tyrants had made to initiate and continue wars to serve their own political, personal and pecuniary purposes. The framers preferred to entrust in Congress the responsibility to make the awesome decision to go war, as well as the commencement of military hostilities short of war. The system was designed, as James Wilson said, to “prevent one man” from taking the nation to war because, as George Mason declared, the “executive was not to be trusted with it.”
Delegates to the Constitutional Convention, like others with wartime experience then, and now, agreed that it is easier to start a war than to end one. The framers were not naïve; they were not convinced that members of Congress would possess unassailable wisdom on the question of going to war and whether to risk the blood and treasure of the nation. Hardly. They embraced, rather, the wisdom reflected in the process of congressional deliberation, the crossfire of discussion and debate that distinguishes a republican form of government. While Congress might make a mistake in declaring war on another nation, there was, the framers reckoned, the prospect of greater wisdom in the collective judgment of the people’s representatives, rather the unilateral judgment, temperament and character of the president, whose decisions might involve America in a degree of distress from which the nation might not recover. At all events, congressional debate would inform the public about the solemn decision made by their legislative representatives, hold the elected officials accountable and, perhaps, rally citizens to a cause that might cost them their lives.
In a “constitutional world,” Congress would own the war that it has, to invoke Hamilton, “authorized or begun.” It would hold hearings on the status of the hostilities, require the administration to articulate and explain military objectives, acknowledge challenges and identify achievements. Based on these hearings, Congress might decide to terminate the hostilities or perhaps increase funding, or possibly instruct the president to change course, as it has throughout American history, all in the exercise of its constitutional authority over the commander in chief in the conduct of the war.
Trump’s unilateral War in Iran, however, bears none of these constitutional characteristics. Once again, the Republican controlled Congress, which has unconstitutionally ceded some of the legislature’s fundamental powers—appropriations and lawmaking, among others—has elected to facilitate Trump’s authoritarian presidency, rather than honoring its constitutional responsibilities.
There is, across the vista of two centuries, the echo of Patrick Henry’s plaintive plea in the Virginia Ratifying Convention: “If you depend on your President’s and Senator’s patriotism, you are gone.”
David Adler is president of The Alturas Institute, a non-profit organization created to promote the Constitution, gender equality and civic education. This column is made possible with the support of the South Dakota Humanities Council, South Dakota NewsMedia Association and this newspaper.
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