Who Leads on Foreign Policy?
by Stuart Taylor, Jr.
The battle over allocation of foreign-policy powers between the president and Congress, joined so publicly during the Reagan administration, has moved underground amid signs that neither branch learned much from the traumas of the late 1980s.
The Bush administration, bolstered by bold misreadings of the Constitution and its history, has issued sweeping claims of executive power that virtually exclude Congress from the conduct of foreign affairs.
Two administration lawyers recently asserted in a letter to The New York Review of Books that the Framers had intended a system "whereby the president executes the law and conducts foreign affairs, subject only to specific congressional checks"-and armed with ”a residual power that encompasses all authority not expressly delegated to the other branches of government.”
And in a pretrial brief in the Oliver North case, Dick Thornburgh’s Justice Department contended in 1988 that "the president has plenary power which Congress cannot invade" to circumvent congressional spending bans by soliciting money from foreign leaders for covert military operations. When Congress voted last year to bar such solicitations, the administration said it was unconstitutional and the president vetoed the bill.
Meanwhile, after episodic resistance to the Reagan policies in Central America, Congress has resumed its decades-old habit of acquiescence in unilateral presidential actions, including those that skirt its own laws.
When the president invades Panama, hardly bothering to notify (let alone consult) anyone in Congress, the public approves, so Congress applauds. So much for the War Powers Resolution of 1973, which was supposed to prevent unilateral presidential use of military force.