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 KingmakersTrump 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 Actimperial 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, citingamong 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 months of being sworn into office, Nixon covertly expanded that conflict into Cambodia without any authorization from Congress. When the escalation became public, lawmakers in 1971 repealed the original resolution authorizing the Vietnam invasion.
But the Nixon administration was only forced to start ending the war when, a year later, lawmakers began advancing legislation to explicitly block any federal money from being used to conduct military operations in the region. Indeed, after legislators began to vote on such measures, Nixon signed the Paris Peace Accords.
Less than a decade later, Reagan deployed troops to Lebanon with no initial authorization from Congress. The operation dragged on and Reagan seemed to want the deployment to continue, even after a deadly bombing of Marine barracks. That’s when Democratic lawmakers began threatening to cut off funds for the operation. Soon after, Reagan ended the deployment.
As we show in Master Planthe nascent conservative movement of the 1980s loathed the idea of congressional involvement in foreign affairs. Indeed, the Heritage Foundation’s Mandate for Leadership – the policy bible that Reagan personally endorsed – counseled that only the president and the White House can assume real leadership in foreign policy.
And so following the Lebanon setback, frustrated Reagan officials tried to defy Congress’s power of the purse altogether – specifically by ignoring laws that blocked funding for the administration’s anti-communist proxy war in Nicaragua. But their defiance did not forge a new presidential power to unilaterally spend on war. Quite the opposite: the Reagan administration’s gambit blew up in conservatives’ faces and became the disastrous Iran-Contra scandal that permanently scarred Reagan’s legacy and resulted in a barrage of indictments.
Following that failure to destroy the legislative branch’s power of the purse, the Iraq war became a reprise of yet another battle between Congress and the executive branch. The Bush administration promised that the conflict would be short-lived and inexpensivebut the conflict dragged on for years, thanks in part to lawmakers of both parties writing blank checks to fund it.
Finally in 2007, congressional Democrats passed legislation tying new war funding to a timetable for withdrawal. Although Bush vetoed that bill, the next year he began an initial draw down of troops.
Taken together, the details of these past fights vary, but the pattern is clear: imperial presidents tend only to halt their martial adventures when the legislative branch moves to defund them. Indeed, the axiom is relevant in the Trump era – it seems like no coincidence that the administration softened its Immigration and Customs Enforcement assault on US cities after Democratic lawmakers responded to violence in Minneapolis by stalling funding for the agency.
And yet somehow, these power-of-the-purse lessons now seem lost on Democratic leaders when it comes to Trump’s Iran war. Most in the opposition party purport to oppose the conflict – but so far, Democrats have not successfully used congressional power to try to defund it.
Amid US casualties, economic chaos and Trump reportedly pondering the deployment of ground troops in Iran, congressional Democrats have responded by voting for a resolution to outlaw military action against Iran without a congressional declaration of war. However, many of the party’s leaders are concurrently trying to avoid committing to an effort to cut off funding.
Top Democrats on the Senate armed services committee toggled between press releases criticizing Trump’s war and telling Politico they nonetheless might vote for – rather than filibuster – a $50bn supplemental appropriations bill to fund it. House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, who touted his support for last week’s failed war powers resolution aimed at the Iran war, simultaneously avoided committing to an attempt to block more money for that same war.
Some Democrats’ equivocation may reflect their feeling caught between voters’ opposition to Trump’s war and their own longstanding support for regime change in Iran. But after Iraq war critics spent the Bush era being depicted as unpatriotic, terrorist-enabling obstructionists, many Democratic lawmakers also likely worry that voting to defund Trump’s war will get them cast as disloyal to the troops and sympathetic to the Iranian regime.
“We have seen this movie before,” said CNN’s Jake Tapper when interviewing Democratic senator Chris Murphy. “We know that that vote will be cast as – especially if you run for higher office – you voting against the troops.”
Democrats may fear this old media-amplified trope, but it is outdated – because today’s political climate is very different from the post-September 11 period. After the Bush administration’s (dishonest) sales pitch back then, polls showed the Iraq invasion was initially popular. By contrast, the Trump administration didn’t even offer a public sales pitch, and polls show the Iran attack is one of the most initially unpopular military operations in modern American history. So it is far less politically risky for Democrats to oppose this war – and to use their congressional power to legislatively obstruct its funding.
Of course, American popular opinion hasn’t stopped the Washington press corps from reverting to its old tricks. For instance, CNN – which is about to be subsumed by Trump’s billionaire ally – has been running the cartoonishly Orwellian chyron insisting “Democrats In A Bind Over As War In Iran Escalates,” as if there’s some sort of quandary about whether or not the opposition party should block more funding and stand with the vast majority of voters who oppose the conflict.
But at least some Democrats aren’t taking the bait.
“The one thing the American people are clear about is that they do not want the United States dragged into another long-term war in the Middle East,” Murphy told Tapper. “If you support the troops, then you should be voting against funding this war so that we get our troops out of harm’s way. Virtually nothing good happened from sending thousands of Americans to die inside Iraq in the 2000s, and if we don’t learn that lesson, then shame on every single one of us.”
And after the defeat of his war powers resolution, the Democratic representative Ro Khanna from California said his party will need to be pressured into asserting the power of the purse. Citing history, he rightly suggested that a funding blockade is the only way Trump’s war can be stopped.
“We need to be very clear: zero supplemental dollars for the war,” he told the Lever. “That’s how you end wars. That’s how we ended Vietnam. That’s how we ended Iraq. And frankly, it is totally disingenuous for people to say, well, they voted on this war powers resolution and they’re opposed to war, but then they’re voting for funding it. There are a lot of [Democrats] who want you to believe they’re against the war but may still vote for the funding. So we’ve got to work on making that a clear line.”
-
David Sirota, Jared Jacang Maher, Laura Krantz and Ron S Doyle are the producers of the Lever’s investigative podcast Master Plan. The show’s second season about presidential power, The Kingmakers, debuts on 16 March at MasterPlanPodcast.com or in your podcast app
