IMPERIAL CONSERVATIVES?

American conservatives have come a long way since 1952, when Ohio’s Senator John Bricker introduced a constitutional amendment to restrict the President’s treaty-making power. Perhaps they’ve come too far. Today nothing brings foam to the conservative mandible more reliably than a favorable allusion to the Boland Amendments or the War Powers Act, and cries against “congressional micromanagement” and “535 Secretaries of State” became watchwords among Washington conservatives during the Reagan Presidency.

John Bricker certainly would never have endorsed either Boland or War Powers—both are stupid measures, the one as harmful as the other is frivolous—but he surely would have agreed with their basic assumption of legislative supremacy. The idea that the legislative branch has a vital role to play in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and the disposition of American troops was fundamental to the principles espoused by Bricker, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and other spokesmen of the Right. Taft, in the words of Russell Kirk and James McClellan, asserted “the right and the necessity, in the American democratic republic, for Congress to participate with the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs,” and “Mr. Republican” himself wrote in A Foreign Policy for Americans:

SF

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Samuel Francis

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William F. Buckley Jr.

American conservatives have come a long way since 1952, when Ohio’s Senator John Bricker introduced a constitutional amendment to restrict the President’s treaty-making power. Perhaps they’ve come too far. Today nothing brings foam to the conservative mandible more reliably than a favorable allusion to the Boland Amendments or the War Powers Act, and cries against “congressional micromanagement” and “535 Secretaries of State” became watchwords among Washington conservatives during the Reagan Presidency.

John Bricker certainly would never have endorsed either Boland or War Powers—both are stupid measures, the one as harmful as the other is frivolous—but he surely would have agreed with their basic assumption of legislative supremacy. The idea that the legislative branch has a vital role to play in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and the disposition of American troops was fundamental to the principles espoused by Bricker, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and other spokesmen of the Right. Taft, in the words of Russell Kirk and James McClellan, asserted “the right and the necessity, in the American democratic republic, for Congress to participate with the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs,” and “Mr. Republican” himself wrote in A Foreign Policy for Americans: