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Curbing a future president's war powers?
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The problem with funding cut-off
According to Obama, the reason that Bush and Cheney say Congress could only cut off funding and not choose other ways to curtail the president is “because they know that politically, there’s great sensitivity in cutting off funding — or the perception that we’d be cutting off funding to the troops. So it’s a political ploy and, I think, highly cynical.”
Without addressing specific legislative limits on Bush or on future commanders in chief, another Democratic presidential hopeful ,Sen. Joe Biden of Delaware, said Tuesday, “When a president of the United States decides that he or she wishes to take the country in a direction in a war fundamentally different than the majority of the American people want, the president has an obligation to listen to the American people, whether it’s me as president or anybody else as president.”
And there’s the short-term difficulty, at least politically, for the presidential contenders: what is the will of the American people?
In a recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll, respondents were asked, “Would you favor or oppose Congress cutting funding for the Iraq war as a way to ensure that President Bush does not have sufficient funds to send troops to Iraq?”
A minority, 41 percent, supported cutting the funds, while a 52 percent opposed that idea.
The lessons of 1999
Biden and other senators wrestled with similar questions eight years ago when President Clinton sent U.S. forces to Kosovo to stop the Serbs attacks on ethnic Albanians.
In May of 1999, Biden, McCain and Dodd joined forces to co-sponsor a resolution authorizing Clinton to “use all necessary force” to support the NATO attacks on Serbia.
The Senate voted 78 to 22 to table — in other words, to kill — the McCain-Biden-Dodd resolution, with 45 Republicans and 33 Democrats voting against giving Clinton the authority.
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A week earlier, the House had split 213 to 213 on a resolution supporting Clinton’s operations against Serbia.
Most Republicans, including many who now support Bush’s Iraq policy, such as Sen. Lindsey Graham, R- S.C. who was then a member of the House, voted to oppose Clinton.
Most House Democrats, including those such as Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Rep. John Murtha who now oppose Bush’s Iraq policy, voted to support Clinton in 1999.
But even without the specific authorization from Congress, Clinton had the funding and he carried on.
What the next president should ponder
One veteran of the Clinton presidency, Walter Dellinger, the former solicitor general in the Clinton administration who now teaches law at Duke University law school, said a congressionally imposed ceiling on the number of troops deployed in Iraq “is clearly constitutional — as long as you recognize that the president has the authority to make exceptions to it in exigent circumstances involving protection of U.S. troops or protection of vital interests.”
And he added, “Everyone who considers running for the presidency or becoming president has to understand that they have a responsibility to pass that office on to his or her successors with its essential attributes unimpaired by adverse (congressional) precedents.”
If past is prologue, all these arguments are likely to be reprised in some form during the next presidency.
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