When It Comes to War,
Congress Has No Bite
By Paul Kendall

The Democrats were elected to Congress in 2006 promising to end the war in Iraq and to bring the troops home. Despite lots of barking at President Bush, they have failed to do either. This is because Congress has pulled its own teeth. It has no bite.

Our representatives in Washington may have good intentions. They may hold tough-talking investigative hearings and make news-worthy public pronouncements, but their oratory is empty. When they vote on military appropriations, instead of reductions we get more planes, more troops, more weapons systems, and more military bases.

For almost sixty years, Congress has fed what President Eisenhower publicly called the "military-industrial complex": a web of inter-related financial and political pressure points that secure appropriations for the military, profits for industry, and re-election votes for Congress. Privately, Eisenhower referred to this web of influence as the "military-industrial-congressional complex".

Under our Constitution, only Congress has the power to declare war, and only it can appropriate the funds necessary to fight wars. And yet, having created the largest military system in the world, Congress has lost control over both war and the military purse.

Every president since at least President Truman has acted without the prior approval of Congress, using our military power to topple governments, to invade nations, or to commit other acts of war. By creating a vast standing army and a superpower military capacity, Congress has given the President all the tools he needs to do as he wishes. He does not need to ask Congress either for approval or for funding until after our troops are already under fire.

The politics surrounding military appropriations are no different than those surrounding appropriations for anything else. Many members of Congress would like to end the wasteful and sometimes pernicious nature of this back-scratching system, but they cannot vote against an omnibus budget package that contains funding for their local businesses and jobs for their local constituents. "You have to give in order to get" and "bringing home the bacon" are two of the immutable requirements of representative government.

No, the genie is out of the bottle when it comes to Congress controlling a president intent upon committing acts of war. Despite its bark, Congress has no bite.

Some would argue that this is inevitable and even desirable, given the global range of US interests, the complexity of world affairs, and the need to act quickly in an unstable security environment. The more extreme advocates of this persuasion will continue to play upon the public’s fear of terrorist attacks, and they will continue to beat the drums for placing a robust, muscular, and superpower-level of military strength at the disposal of the President.

But others see the 2006 Democratic victories in Congress as the beginning of an historic shift in Washington’s center of gravity. For them, the upcoming November elections are an opportunity to continue a national debate over how best to provide for America’s long-term security and prosperity.

These non-traditionalists offer an alternative that is more focused upon re-building our nation’s infrastructure, educational system, environmental technology, and economic opportunity than upon military procurement. It is also an alternative that seeks to balance our military presence with development assistance abroad. These proponents argue, first, that foreign assistance programs can better promote security than does military adventurism and, second, that domestic investments can be more beneficial to job growth, to employment prospects, to business profits, and to the general well-being of local constituents than is procuring unnecessary military hardware.

Convincing a majority of the electorate of the wisdom of this alternative will be no simple task. Fear and vested self-interests are hard to defeat.

Fortunately, however, there are signs that much of the public already perceives the disadvantages of our commitments to military excess. Fortunately too, it now looks like the presidential election will in fact be focused squarely upon these different visions of security and prosperity.

In arguing for the alternative, those who wish to change the way in which the US conducts itself in world affairs will pose a threat to the military-industrial-congressional juggernaut. By offering a different set of priorities for the use of the nation’s financial resources—but one that still meets the political and economic self-interests of Congresspersons for votes and of local constituents for jobs and profits—that juggernaut might be broken.

Congress may never be able to regain all of its bite over war, but a new president and the people can give Congress a chance to regain some of its power over the military purse. By choosing change over more of the same, by choosing domestic investment over saber-rattling, the electorate can provide Congress with an alternative to the military side of the military-industrial-congressional triad. For the good of the Republic and for the good of Congress, therefore, let the debate begin.

Paul Kendall, a semi-retired private investor and resident of Braintree, has traveled widely and lived in South America. He has studied foreign policy at American University in Washington, D.C. and focuses on issues of national security and U.S.-Latin American relations.