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To Chain the Dog of War
| Article
# : |
11936 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
8 / 1987 |
5,256 Words |
| Author
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Edwin B. Firmage
Edwin B. Firmage is professor of constitutional law at the
University of Utah College of Law. His most recent book
(coauthored with the late Francis Wormuth) is To Chain
the Dog of War: The War Power of Congress in History
and Law (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press,
1986). |
The framers of our Constitution separated the power to decide for war from the power to conduct it. The power to initiate war, except for sudden attack upon our country, was lodged exclusively in the Congress. The president was confined to conducting war once Congress had decided upon such a course.
The assumptions behind this separation of war powers are as vital to us two hundred years later as they were when these ideas were penned in Philadelphia. The executive or monarchical inclination to make war impulsively, without deliberate debate among a sizeable and varied body of people, was thought by many to have contributed to decades of war that ravaged Europe. War came almost to be the natural condition, interrupted by rare periods of peace.
The framers thought that by denying the president the monarchical power of raising armies and deciding for war and by placing such powers in the Congress, the sensitivities of the people who had to fight any pay for such wars would be reflected through their representatives. In other words, the condition of peace, not war, was considered to be normal. The biases and presumptions of law and government, the inertia factor, were placed on the side of peace. Those who were for war had the burden of persuasion not easily borne. Only after open debate in a deliberative body, a process intentionally meant to prevent precipitous, cavalier action, would the state move from peace to war.
A number of factors have eroded these constitutional checks against war. Two world wars and a depression in this century have moved much governmental power from the deliberative body - Congress - to the executive. Certain advantages of administration and dispatch are obvious. But the costs of executive abuse - Watergate, Iran and Nicaragua, and executive war in Korea and Vietnam - have been devastating. Perhaps government based upon an assumption of perpetual crisis fulfills its own presumption.
Peace and War
In a very real sense, more than half of our people now living have not known peace. We have been subject to a Cold War since World War II ended. Previous generations have enjoyed peace, at least between wars. Now almost every problem, domestic and foreign, is considered within the matrix of Cold War. Hatreds that in times past were intentionally set loose in time of war were mercifully confined within the period of war - 1914-1918, 1941-1945. Now endemic fear is intentionally and systematically passed on through
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