Abstract
On March 17, President George W. Bush announced to the nation that the United States was going to war against Iraq. The next day's headline should have read “Congress Declares War on Iraq”–except that Congress did not declare war, despite its constitutionally delegated responsibility. In fact, Congress has not officially acted on the question of war and peace since its October 2002 vote authorizing the president to decide.
Despite U.S. military actions in Korea in the 1950s and in Vietnam in the 1960s and 1970s, and more recent smaller conflicts in Panama, Grenada, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan, Congress has failed to declare war since Pearl Harbor.
As the nation moved toward war in March, debates raged in the U.N. Security Council. The British, Canadian, and Turkish parliaments engaged in major debates. Harsh exchanges were traded between Washington, Paris, London, Moscow, Berlin, and other capitals. Dueling opinion pieces appeared in the nation's editorial pages, and worldwide demonstrations against the war were organized, using the Internet as a major channel of communications.
But Congress was silent.
Congress could have used the power of the purse to curtail the drive toward war. Before the fighting started, the administration adamantly refused to provide any estimate of the costs of the impending war. Administration officials argued repeatedly that the costs of the war and its aftermath were unknowable. Some members of Congress–primarily Democrats–complained, but got nowhere. The Bush team preferred to change the subject by crusading for the centerpiece of its domestic agenda–a $1.6 trillion tax cut, including a $726 billion “economic growth package”–despite rising federal budget deficits and the war.
On March 6, Cong. David Obey, a Wisconsin Democrat, asked wryly: “Can you imagine President Teddy Roosevelt or President Woodrow Wilson or FDR or Harry Truman saying we are going to war and your country needs you to accept a tax cut?”
Congress could have used the appropriations or budget process to deal with the question of war. Independent estimates indicated that the cost–to be borne virtually exclusively by U.S. taxpayers–might top $100 billion. The estimated $60 billion price tag for the 1991 Gulf War, in contrast, was mostly paid for by other nations. Eric Shinseki, army chief of staff, estimated that in addition to immediate costs, the United States would need to maintain an occupying force in Iraq of as many as 200,000 soldiers, perhaps for as long as a decade. And the Council on Foreign Relations estimated that it would cost a minimum of $20 billion a year to rebuild the country. (Finally, on March 24, the Bush administration asked Congress for $74.7 billion for fiscal 2003.)
Earlier, even as U.S. and British troops headed for the Iraqi border, Republicans were trying to pass an annual budget resolution without allocating a dime for the war, for rebuilding Iraq, or even for the continued fighting and reconstruction effort in Afghanistan. The House of Representatives approved a budget resolution without any of these funds, but did endorse the Bush administration's entire tax cut.
In the Senate, the verdict was mixed. The Senate rejected 56-43 an amendment offered by Kent Conrad, North Dakota Democrat, prohibiting the tax cut until the president submitted a detailed estimate of the cost of the war. It then turned around and approved 52-47 an amendment offered by Russ Feingold, Wisconsin Democrat, to set aside a reserve fund of $100 billion to pay for the war. The administration's belated submission of its war funds request did help the success of Louisiana Democrat John Breaux's amendment to halve the centerpiece of the Bush tax cut. The fate of both the Feingold and Breaux amendments was to be determined by a House-Senate conference committee completed after this writing.
The Senate spent the week before the president's war announcement consumed with a debate over the controversial procedure called “late-term” or “partial-birth” abortion and the nomination of D.C. Circuit Court nominee Miguel Estrada. It also found time to deal with National Girl Scout Week and Greek Independence Day. The House adopted medical malpractice insurance legislation. Neither body debated the war.
The Senate leadership of the two parties agreed to set aside a few hours for discussion on a sparsely attended Friday session on March 7. As Virginia Republican John Warner put it, the discussion would be on “the international situation … relating to the war on terrorism, with emphasis on Iraq and North Korea.” Seven senators participated.
There were a few heroes who tried to get Congress to reconsider the war in a serious manner. In the Senate, 85-year-old Robert Byrd, Democrat of West Virginia, has been eloquent and even strident in denouncing the administration's drive to war. In a widely disseminated speech delivered on the Senate floor on February 12, Byrd argued that the United States was “about to embark upon the first test of a revolutionary doctrine applied in an extraordinary way at an unfortunate time. The doctrine of preemption–the idea that the United States or any other nation can legitimately attack a nation that is not imminently threatening but may be threatening in the future–is a radical new twist of the traditional idea of self-defense.”
Senators Robert Byrd, Patrick Leahy, and Ted Stevens before a hearing of the Appropriations Committee, during which they were pressed to approve the supplemental budget request to cover the cost of the war in Iraq.
Byrd castigated the Bush administration for “split[ting] traditional alliances, possibly crippling, for all time, international order-keeping entities like the United Nations and NATO.” And yet the Senate, he sadly noted, is “ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing.”
Vermont Democrat Patrick Leahy agreed in a March 3 Senate floor speech: “What I hear from people is: Why is there not any discussion about a possible war against Iraq? The British Parliament has had a major debate on it. The Turkish Parliament had a major debate on it. The Canadian Parliament had a major debate on it…. The impression of the American people, both Republicans and Democrats, is that the Senate does not want to discuss a war with Iraq.”
Massachusetts Democrat Edward Kennedy, a liberal workhorse who in past years had devoted much of his time to health care, education, and other domestic issues, turned his focus toward the impending war in a March 13 Senate speech. “I am concerned,” he said, “that as we rush to war with Iraq, we are becoming more divided at home and more isolated in the world community. Instead of persuading the dissenters at home and abroad, the administration by its harsh rhetoric is driving the wedge deeper. Never before, even in the Vietnam War, has America taken such bold military action with so little international support.”
Both Byrd and Kennedy–and in the House, Oregon's Peter DeFazio–introduced resolutions to force Congress to vote a second time on whether the country should go to war.
They got nowhere. The Republican Party was adamantly opposed to a new vote; so too were the Democrats. The Republican motivation was easy to understand. Congress had spoken in October, giving the president full authority to proceed as he desired. As House Appropriations Committee Chairman C. W. “Bill” Young told the March 15 Congressional Quarterly, “Congress should not be micromanaging a war. Congress should be in a support role.”
For the Democrats, a new vote would only have demonstrated the division within the party. When the Senate voted 77-23 for the use-of-force resolution in October, 29 Democrats voted “yea” and 21 voted “nay.” House Democrats were also split; in an overall vote of 296-133, 126 opposed the resolution and 81 voted for it. Even war critics acknowledged that a new vote would have produced a similar outcome.
Congress's failure to act is not new. Many in both parties were uneasy with, or opposed to, U.S. military involvement in Kosovo and Bosnia, but refused to force President Bill Clinton to call the troops home. Since World War II, Congress has willingly ceded the power to make war–letting the president take responsibility for success or failure. And if the war goes badly, as in Somalia in the 1990s, Congress is also willing to let the president take the fall.
As the Vietnam War wound down and President Richard Nixon became increasingly crippled by Watergate, in 1973 Congress adopted the War Powers Act over a presidential veto. That bill would have forced a president to bring U.S. troops home from any overseas engagement within 60 days if Congress has not in the meantime approved the fighting.
It was a bold action, but there has been no follow-through. For 30 years, Congress and presidents have ignored that law just as they have ignored the Constitution. As the war clouds gathered, Congress went AWOL–again. Senators and representatives decided they would rather talk about Iraq than vote, and better yet, change the subject.