The Will of One Man

‘I
n the maelstrom of modern war, presumed certainties crumble like piecrust.” So George Will begins a recent Washington Post column. Indeed, certainties like Will’s own adamantine commitment to the constitutional separation of powers.

He begins his column as an impatient tutor, instructing us against all the evidence of our senses that the Founders’ putting the power to declare war, raise armies, and fund war amounts to “almost nothing.” He ends the column in a contrary, almost rueful tone, sighing that there’s simply nothing to be done about the imperious executive when it comes to war.

For decades, and even up until the past few weeks, I’ve been reading Will’s excoriations of the swollen presidency. Most recently, he’s been praising the Supreme Court for giving a “jolt” to Congress to reclaim its tariff powers from President Trump — who, assuming they had been delegated in previous legislation, dared to exercise what he believed to be his lawful powers by imposing tariffs. Will couldn’t possibly hold that tariffs are a “major question” but war is not. And yet he is definitive:

 What is constitutionally (never mind prudentially) obligatory concerning Congress’s involvement in uses of military force? The answer is: almost nothing.

We already have the parenthetical hint that Will has decided, like so many of the progressive jurists he has skewered for years, that the Constitution’s plain meaning can be evaded simply by declaring constitutional fidelity to be impractical. He then proceeds to the heart of his argument:

Surprise is a substantial military asset. If the Trump administration had briefed legislators in advance, could it have achieved the targeted killings crucial to its regime decapitation objective — an objective intended to economize violence?

His rationale includes that the executive runs around the clock while Congress is dispersed, that “presidents can act with more energy and dispatch than Congress,” and that “if the power to make war were vested in Congress, the president might lack the power to respond unilaterally to sudden attacks.”

Conformity with law and the Constitution is a burden that Will is happy to endure when it comes to trade policy. But the reasons that Congress has cited in its occasional efforts to delegate limited powers on tariffs to presidents are the very same that Will cites for an executive who can unilaterally send his nation into war. A Congress of hundreds of members is unfit to negotiate tariff rates with other heads of state; the body may be dispersed or otherwise unable to effectively respond when another nation launches a tariff or other non-trade barrier in the way of our commerce.

There are, of course, even more important reasons to take the Founders seriously when they entrusted the war power to Congress. James Madison helpfully explained, writing under the name “Helvidius” in the Federalist papers:

War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.

Hence it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war: hence it is the practice of all states, in proportion as they are free, to disarm this propensity of its influence.

Besides his gestures at a long-established pattern of congressional abdication and self-enfeeblement — the very pattern of behavior Will wants the Court to “jolt” on other major questions — there’s an invocation of technological change. That’s all it takes for Will to conclude that war is a one-man enterprise.

If war was as dangerous to liberty at home — and an occasion of corruption and self-seeking for the executive and the courtiers around him — as our Founders suspected and warned, Will’s sighing harrumph is just an admission that our self-government as a people is a pretense. One man, wearing a white baseball cap at 3 a.m., can unilaterally commit us to any mission his heart desires.

Has Will not noticed that the decades of congressional dithering about war powers coincide with wars that were, in the end, conducted unsuccessfully or to the public’s immense dissatisfaction? The foreign-policy cortège around the president, having been unable to achieve their grand global visions with our special forces, weapons systems, and local proxies, then rounds on the American public and blames their “isolationism” for their own failures to successfully execute a foreign policy more appropriate for a moral-imperial court than a republic.

Will was, of course, writing just a few days after the president decided to launch a war. There were, as he typed, reports of many Iranian clerics freshly crisped by our precision weapons. Will argues truthfully that such an operation probably could not have been carried out with congressional involvement — the necessary element of surprise would have been off the table, and the mission’s odds of success judged low enough that it would have been abandoned.

I have the benefit of writing several days later (eons in the media world) and so have the benefit of the reminder that history (and the oil futures market) always seems to deliver — that another serious advantage in war-making, at least for democracies, is robust public support for the mission. The structures and ceremonies of self-government certainly do take away some initiatives from one-man rule and impose burdens on the imperial presidency. That’s the point.