At the root of the ongoing struggles over many issues and policies now you can see a key strand: the issue is over the powers of the Presidency and how much power and influence Congress has to advise, consent and, in many, cases shape final national policy.
A key theme in many commentaries by administration critics (partisan and those who are not writing from a Democratic party affiliated standpoint) the central argument has been attributing the present power-definition crises to the Bush administration’s move to create a much stronger president — to return the office to kind of pre-Watergate presidency status.
But is that really what has occurred?
The Christian Science Monitor has an op-ed piece by Pat M. Holt is former chief of staff of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in which Holt argues that Congress has essentially ceded its powers — and that the constitution never gave Bush authority to be commander in chief over the entire nation. Here are a few of the kee paragraphs from this piece, that should be read in full:
On Capitol Hill, both the Senate and House are wreaking havoc on the Bush policy in Iraq. Bush came to the White House with an exaggerated notion of the powers of the president based on the constitutional provision making him commander in chief. September 11 gave him the opportunity to expand this notion. The Republicans in Congress were cheerleaders for him; Democrats were paralyzed by political cowardice.
But he is commander in chief only of the armed forces, not of the country. The Constitution gives Congress a number of powers to complement the president’s role as commander in chief. They include the power “[t]o raise and support Armies … [t]o provide and maintain a Navy … [t]o make rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces … [t]o provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the Militia….”
These powers, plus the congressional power to declare war, considerably modify the role of the commander in chief. Much of American history is concerned with struggles between the president and Congress over where to draw the line between themselves. There has been a back-and-forth swing of the pendulum between the two branches, sometimes accompanied by bitter disputes, as in the cases of Vietnam and now Iraq. The most important congressional power is the control of money. The power of the purse was what ultimately ended US involvement in Vietnam.
And, indeed, the notion of the pendulum of history often gets lost in the day-to-day, often angry political debate. And where we now?
At place that Holt asserts isn’t pretty:
Unless Bush makes a sharp change in direction not only in Iraq but especially in how he looks at the balance of power between the executive and legislative branches, his principal legacy could well be a dysfunctional government.
Members of Congress in both parties need to take another look at their own role vis-Ã -vis the president and how their failure to assert themselves post-9/11 contributed to the country’s present troubles.
What’s unusual here is Holt’s final statement: he isn’t saying just Republicans are to blame. He’s telling Democrats that they, too, might want to look in the mirror and see how they contributed to the overall image (putting aside any defensive explanations of why Democrats responded the way they did).
Which begs the question: if we are living in an age of dysfunctional government, what is the solution? If a single party didn’t quite work, and divided government with both major parties don’t work…what’s next? And is there a “next”?
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.