The Epic Fury on Capitol Hill

Talk about Epic Fury. That’s the military moniker for America’s strikes against Iran, but it also sums up the mood of Capitol Hill Democrats enraged by President Trump’s demarche against the Islamic Republic. “The Constitution says we’re not supposed to be at war without a vote of Congress,” avers Senator Tim Kaine. The solons are set to vote this week on a measure to curb the president’s warmaking power, but Mr. Trump has the Constitution on his side. “Congress must convene on Monday to vote,” Congressman Ro Khanna avers, “to stop this.” Senator Mark Kelly, who recently urged American soldiers and sailors to refuse orders, says Mr. Trump “has no plan to avoid escalation into a wider conflict that puts more servicemembers in harm’s way.” For Mr. Khanna, political considerations take precedence. He calls it “disastrous” for a Democrat “to vote for Donald Trump’s war in the Middle East.” Senator Chris Van Hollen calls the Pentagon’s strikes “illegal, regime-change war against Iran.” The Democrats reckon that, per the Constitution, only Congress can declare a war. Yet the Framers also designated the president “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.” Today Mr. Trump in that role explains that the military operation is needed to address the “intolerable threat” posed by Iran’s “sick and sinister” regime.Tension between the White House and Capitol Hill is hardly novel when it comes to the exercise of America’s military might. This is partly a matter of the Framers’ design, under which “war-making” is what historian Arthur Schlesinger called “a shared power.” The president is assigned power to command the military, but Congress has authority to fund it and, per Article I, Section 8, to “make rules for the Government and Regulation of the land and naval Forces.” Hamilton envisioned both Congress and presidents wielding these powers, as he put it in 23 Federalist, in the spirit of “Energetic Government.” Yet Congress has long grasped the need to defer to the president on defense. When a senator in 1907 balked at funding President Theodore Roosevelt’s globe-spanning dispatch of the Great White Fleet, T.R. vowed that the ships “would stay in the Pacific” if Congress failed to cough up the spondulix. The move in 1973 by Democratic majorities in Congress to curb presidential war powers reflected frustrations over the conflict in Indochina. The unsatisfactory outcome of that conflict was, to a degree, the result of Congress’ failure to declare a war that mobilized the nation’s resources toward victory, as America had done, say, in World War II. Yet the War Powers Act, by limiting presidents’ freedom of action, disturbs the constitutional order. The attempts by the solons to peer over the presidential shoulder when it came to military maneuvering, in Schlesinger’s telling, were “both hazardous and presumptuous.” After all, he added, it was “something the Founding Fathers themselves were too wise to attempt.” Hamilton had called it “impossible to foresee or define the extent and variety of national exigencies,” or the “extent & variety of the means which may be necessary to satisfy them.”Which brings us back to the ire of the Capitol Hill Democrats who demand that, as Congressman Hakeem Jeffries puts it, Mr. Trump “must seek authorization for the preemptive use of military force that constitutes an act of war.” Yet, as Hamilton cautioned, “the circumstances that endanger the safety of nations are infinite; and for this reason no constitutional shackles can wisely be imposed on the power to which the care of it is committed.”

The Epic Fury on Capitol Hill

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