Drift

Meanwhile, leaders in both the House and the Senate let Bush know they would get going on oversight hearings into the president’s policies in the Gulf tout de suite, before the new Congress convened.

As far as Bush was concerned, this aggression would not stand either.

The president called the congressional leaders into the White House and fired a warning shot. He had bent over backward to “consult” with Congress, he said, but “consultation is a two-way street. I think it is only fair that I get to hear your specific ideas in private about the tough choices we face before people go out and take public stances.” He pulled out press clippings; read them back, verbatim, to his loudest antagonists; and told them that Saddam might just get the message that the United States didn’t have the spine to stay the course. “This is the wrong signal to send at this time.” And about all that talk of Congress having an exclusive power to declare war? Forget it. According to one report out of the meeting, the president had pulled a copy of the Constitution from his suit jacket and waved it in front of the bipartisan congressional delegation. Bush knew what the document said about war powers, he told the group, but “it also says that I’m the commander in chief.”

What’d they think, he was some kind of wimp?

There were some members of Congress on both sides of the aisle who were squarely with Bush. They were with him on the old Reagan line that open public debate was a dangerous thing. Republican Senate leader Bob Dole asked, “How do we have open debate without sending the wrong signal to Saddam?” Republican congressman Henry Hyde went so far as to say that “Congress are supposed to be leaders. We should be carrying the [president’s] message to the people.”

But the point was, the debate in Congress had already begun. The call-up of the Reserves had assured it. There was going to be a public airing of the merits of this war, no matter what the president said.

On November 20, a few days after Bush’s “I’m the commander in chief” performance, a group of forty-five House members led by Rep. Ron Dellums gathered the Capitol Hill press corps to announce that they had filed a lawsuit asking the federal district court in Washington, DC, to demand that the president send to Congress a formal declaration of war to be debated and voted on before American troops were sent into battle. “There is no necessity for quick action here,” said one congressman. “We are not being invaded. There is no reason at all why the Constitution in this case should not be honored. And that’s what this lawsuit is all about.”

This was a more aggressive challenge to the president than that initial warning letter from the Speaker of the House three weeks earlier, before 200,000 more Americans had been pointed east and told to pack. Dellums and company were essentially asking a judge to tie the president’s hands unless and until he got Congress on board. “Some people have said, ‘Well, don’t you believe that this would inconvenience the president?’ ” Dellums said. “The Constitution is designed to inconvenience one person from taking us to war. War is a very solemn and sobering and extraordinary act and it should not be granted to one person.”

“Some people are saying you’re not inconveniencing [the president],” one reporter observed. “You’re undermining his ability to conduct an effective policy in the Persian Gulf.”

“To do anything other than what we’re suggesting here is to undermine the Constitution of the United States,” Dellums countered. “This is not the president’s sole prerogative.”

In the Senate, the Armed Services Committee, chaired by Georgia Democrat Sam Nunn, convened hearings on military readiness and capability in the Gulf, but the hearings quickly turned to questions about the advisability of and the need for a shooting war in Kuwait. And not just whether we ought to fight a war like that, but who would get to say so. Nunn even called as a witness the sharp-eyed Vietnam vet and author James Webb, not long removed from a tour as Reagan’s secretary of the Navy, who argued that Bush needed to get a declaration of war from Congress. Further, if Bush really meant to start a war of this size, his actions ought to live up to the magnitude of that decision. Stop-lossing active-duty troops was one thing, calling up the Guard and Reserves was all well and good, but to knit this into American life even further, the president needed to reinstitute the draft. The entire country needed to feel it, not just the military.

Up till that point, all the president’s steps toward war had been taken unilaterally. But the sheer magnitude of his actions, the number of military personnel he’d had to involve, demanded attention and challenge. The Bush White House seemed to understand that, but to resent and resist it too. “We were confident that the Constitution was on our side when it came to the president’s discretion to use force if necessary,” wrote Brent Scowcroft. “If we sought congressional involvement, it would not be authority we were after, but support.”

Actually, again, not to insist, but the Constitution “with studied care vested the question of war in the Legislature.” But by 1990 the executive branch wasn’t operating as if this was true anymore. Sure, a president going to war would be wise to engage with Congress on the issue. But that engagement was not determinative of whether we would in fact have that war—it was akin to lining up support from some foreign, sometimes-friendly ally: friends with political benefits. Better to have them on board than not, but if they didn’t come along, no biggie.

Not only didn’t the “question of war” vest in the Legislature anymore—it shouldn’t, either. The loudest voice in the Bush White House in favor of steamrolling the national legislature was the secretary of defense, Dick Cheney. Cheney had cut his bureaucratic teeth (and exceedingly sharp they were) as White House chief of staff during the Gerald Ford presidency, back when Congress was first wielding its War Powers Resolution (stupid regulations!) and making unprecedented and unwelcome trips to the White House to stop Ford from taking the country into another war in Vietnam.

“Cheney and I dealt with this congressional backlash in the Ford White House,” Cheney’s mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, wrote in his autobiography. “In the early days of the Ford Administration, Bryce Harlow, the savvy White House Liaison to Congress, former Eisenhower aide, and friend, told me—and I am paraphrasing from memory: ‘The steady pressure by Congress and the courts is to reduce executive authority. It is inexorable, inevitable, and historical. Resolve that when you leave the White House, leave it with the same authorities it had when you came. Do not contribute to the erosion of presidential power on your watch.’ Harlow’s words left an impression on me, and, I suspect, on Cheney.”

Even before the congressional hearings on Saddam and Kuwait had commenced in November 1990, Secretary of Defense Cheney had shipped out to the Sunday talk-show circuit to sound the old Reagan line about the “risky proposition” of leaving national security decisions in the shaky hands of 535 members of Congress. “I take you back to September 1941, when World War II had been under way for two years,” Cheney said on Meet the Press. “Hitler had taken Austria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and was halfway to Moscow. And the Congress, in that setting, two months before Pearl Harbor, agreed to extend the draft for twelve more months… by just one vote.” That Saddam Hussein’s misbegotten—and already-stopped-dead-in-its-tracks—adventure in the Middle East was in no way comparable to Hitler’s blitzkrieg through Europe was beside Cheney’s point. Cheney’s point was that Congress was sure to get out that white paint… and run with the antelopes. Wimps.

Secretary Cheney was no more conciliatory when he went to Capitol Hill to testify at Nunn’s hearings; this was not a man coming hat in hand to ask his former colleagues for permission for anything. In an exchange with Sen. Edward Kennedy, Cheney laid down a stunning new marker for executive power.

KENNEDY: Barring an act of provocation, do you agree that the president must obtain the approval of Congress in advance before the United States attacks Iraq?

CHENEY: Senator, I do not believe the president requires any additional authorization from the Congress before committing US forces to achieve our objectives in the Gulf…. There have been some two hundred times, more than two hundred times, in our history, when presidents have committed US forces, and on only five of those occasions was there a prior declaration of war. And so I am not one who would argue, in this instance, that the president’s hands are tied or that he is unable, given his constitutional responsibilities as commander in chief, to carry out his responsibilities.

KENNEDY: Well, Mr. Secretary, we’re not talking about Libya [where Reagan had run a one-shot bombing raid on its leader, Muammar Qaddafi]. We’re not talking about Grenada…. We’re talking about 440,000 American troops who are over there. We’re talking about a major kind of American military involvement if it becomes necessary to do so. And do I understand from your response that you are prepared to tell the American people now that barring provocation by Saddam Hussein, that you believe [the president], and [the president] alone, can