THE CONGRESS: The Crack in the Constitution

• Share

(5 of 10)

With the outbreak of World War II, the President became a dominant international figure, and Congress assumed more and more the status of acolyte. The cataclysmic cloud of the atomic bomb immeasurably enhanced the life-and-death powers of the President in world affairs. Although there had been some legislative protests when various Presidents had ignored the constitutional war-making powers of Congress by sending troops briefly into Latin American republics in the 1920s, there was little complaint when Harry Truman committed U.S. forces to Korea and Dwight Eisenhower ordered Marines to Lebanon. John Kennedy kept Congress ignorant of his plans to invade Cuba, and Lyndon Johnson merely informed Congress that he was sending troops in huge numbers into Viet Nam. The Gulf of Tonkin resolution, giving Johnson a free hand and later repealed under President Nixon—but without any practical effect in either case—only illustrated the congressional impotence in matters of war. For practical purposes, Presidents have moved away from the treaty-making processes, using Executive agreements and grants-in-aid, thus undercutting the Senate's old dominion in this field.

It is, of course, the long frustration of the Viet Nam War more than any other factor that has fed the growing reaction against presidential power. Indeed, there has been an ironic turnabout by academics and liberals who once excoriated members of Congress as moss-backed obstructionists retarding the social legislation of F.D.R., Truman and Kennedy. Now such critics attack Congressmen for acquiescing in the war policies of Johnson and Nixon, and for not obstructing more. The rationale of legislators has long been that the President "knows better" than they about a complex problem like Viet Nam through the Executive's intelligence and military bureaucracy. But as the Pentagon pa pers suggested, all of the expertise does not necessarily yield sound policy; the decision-making apparatus can achieve a blind momentum of its own. Worse, the White House may deceive Congress about its true intentions. Congressional intervention might well have averted, or shortened, some of the travail—and the need to make a case for Congress might have improved the quality of Executive decision making.

Despite its doubts, Congress has continued to support the war through its military appropriations, partly because it has completely lost its grip on the nation's budget-making machinery.

This, even more than the loss of war powers, may be the most debilitating congressional deference to the Executive Branch. Congress once determined, item by item, what the Government should spend for what purpose, then dutifully raised the revenue to do so. It has attempted to deal with the growing complexity of spending and taxing by creating a multiplicity of committees and subcommittees. As a result, Congress has no overall view of either function, and thus no means of rationally setting priorities. The Bureau of the Budget, created in 1921 to aid both Congress and the President, has been captured by the Executive, reducing Congress to the role of making minor alterations in a hand-me-down budget produced by each Administration.