| The
Constitution Is Our National Strategy
By Bruce Fein
December 01,
2016 "Information
Clearing House"
- "Washington
Times"
-
Contrary to conventional wisdom (which is invariably
wrong), the United States Constitution is the nation’s
strategy for greatness. The strategy entails invincible
self-defense; peace, commerce, and honest friendship
with all nations; and, entangling alliances with none.
At present,
that strategy means returning our troops stationed
abroad back to the United States to defend we the
people, not foreigners whose loyalties lie elsewhere. It
means repositioning all of our air and naval forces to
defend we the people, not foreigners whose loyalties lie
elsewhere. It means devoting our cyber warfare
capabilities to defending we the people, not foreigners
whose loyalties lie elsewhere. And it means renouncing
all of our treaty commitments to defend other nations
militarily without congressional declarations of war.
Our national
strategy of invincible self-defense; peace, commerce,
and honest friendship with all nations; and, entangling
alliances with none, finds expression not in the
Constitution’s text, but in its dispersal of power among
the three branches.
Institutions
possess distinct personalities that transcend the
personalities of the occupants of the offices. These
institutional personalities determine policies within a
very narrow range.
The
Constitution as our national strategy follows inexorably
from its assignment of the war power exclusively to
Congress, i.e., its prohibition of presidential wars.
Article I, section 8, clause 11 empowers only the
legislative branch to declare war.
The
Constitution’s profound authors knew that Congress would
be a “talking shop.” It would be highly risk-averse,
like a dog that retreats to its kennel when danger
appears. Members of Congress would have little to gain
but much to lose politically by initiating war. No
obelisk or monument had ever been constructed to honor a
legislator’s vote for war. Legislative powers diminished
during belligerency. And if the war ended in defeat or a
truce because of the President’s ineptitude as commander
in chief or otherwise, Members would not be able to
evade political responsibility.
The
Constitution’s drafters knew to a virtual certainty that
Congress would only declare war in response to actual or
perceived aggression against the United States, i.e.,
only in self-defense. Indeed, during the drafting,
debating, and ratification of the Constitution, no
participant conceived that the war power would ever be
exercised for preemptive, preventive, humanitarian,
economic, democratizing or other non-self-defense
objectives.
History has
vindicated the Constitution’s conception of the
congressional personality. In 227 years, Congress has
declared war in only five conflicts, and only in
response to actual or perceived aggression against the
United States: the War of 1812; the Mexican-American
War; the Spanish-American War; World War I; and, World
War II. The Declare War Clause required Congress to
decide whether to cross the Rubicon from peace to war.
Congress could not escape its responsibility by
delegating the decision to the President. The June 18,
1812 Declaration of War is exemplary. It provided:
“Be it enacted
by the Senate and House of Representatives of the United
States in Congress assembled, That war be and the same
is hereby declared to exist between the United Kingdom
of Great Britain and Ireland and the dependencies
thereof, and the United States of America and their
territories….”
The
Constitution’s national strategy of wars only in
self-defense and declared by Congress is vastly superior
to all the alternatives that have ever been conceived or
attempted. War diverts invaluable genius and resources
from production to killing, which is an economic
deadweight. War crushes liberty and silences the law.
War breeds secrecy, which fathers fraud, waste, abuse,
and crime. War subordinates civilian supremacy to
tenuous claims of military necessity. War makes killings
legal that would customarily be punished as first-degree
murder. War makes children orphans and wives widows. War
causes courageous soldiers to be slaughtered and maimed.
It causes taxes to be raised or money to be borrowed to
finance the war machine.
Abraham Lincoln
elaborated:
“The provision
of the Constitution giving the war making power to
Congress was dictated…by the following reasons: kings
had always been involving and impoverishing their people
in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the
good of the people was the object. This our convention
understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly
oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the
Constitution that no one man should hold the power of
bringing this oppression upon us.”
Lincoln was
echoing James Madison, father of the Constitution, who
had lettered Thomas Jefferson:
“The
constitution supposes, what the History of all Govts
demonstrates, that the Ex. is the branch of power most
interested in war, & most prone to it. It has
accordingly with studied care, vested the question of
war in the Legisl. But the Doctrines lately advanced
strike at the root of all these provisions, and will
deposit the peace of the Country in that Department
which the Constitution distrusts as most ready without
cause to renounce it.”
Mr. Jefferson
agreed in a letter to Mr. Madison: “We have already
given in example one effectual check to the Dog of war
by transferring the power of letting him loose from the
Executive to the Legislative body, from those who are to
spend to those who are to pay.”
James Wilson,
delegate to the constitutional convention and future
Associate Justice of the United States Supreme Court,
similarly understood that depositing the war power with
Congress would be the death knell to gratuitous wars. He
informed the Pennsylvania Ratification Convention:
“This system
will not hurry us into war; it is calculated to guard
against it. It will not be in the power of a single man,
or a single body of men, to involve us in such distress,
for the important power of declaring war is vested in
the legislature at large; — this declaration must be
made with the concurrence of the House of
Representatives; from this circumstance we may draw a
certain conclusion, that nothing but our national
interest can draw us into a war.”
The United
States generally followed the Constitution’s national
strategy for a century. We astonished the world with our
vertical climb in riches and prosperity by devoting our
energies and talents to making money in lieu of making
war. We proved the prescience of Adam Smith’s
instruction:
“Little else is
requisite to carry a state to the highest degree of
opulence from the lowest barbarism, but peace, easy
taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice: all
the rest being brought about by the natural course of
things.”
But after a
century, we lost our way. We were misled by the
intellectual delusions and messianic ambitions of
Woodrow Wilson and the rebarbative apotheosis of war and
killing by Theodore Roosevelt. The former coveted war to
transform the world into Camelot. The latter barked
that,”[i]f there is not the war, you don’t get the great
general; if there is not a great occasion, you don’t get
a great statesman; if Lincoln had lived in a time of
peace, no one would have known his name.” As President
and commander in chief, Roosevelt warred against
Filipinos fighting for self-determination in the
aftermath of the Spanish-American war by employing
waterboarding and perpetrating mass atrocities. The
United States Senate Investigating Committee on the
Philippines meticulously documented the grisly war
tactics that flourished under President Roosevelt.
We ignored the
warning of Secretary of State John Quincy Adams on July
4, 1821, that we could become dictatress of the world,
but if we did, our policy would degenerate from liberty
to coercion and domination, and we would plunge from
light to darkness.
We have come
full circle from fighting the empire ambitions of
British King George III to embracing them. We have
become the chosen people of the Old Testament bent on
destroying modern counterparts of the Kenites, the
Kenizzites, the Kadmonites, the Hittites, the Rephaims,
the Amorites, the Canaanites, the Girgashites, the
Jebusites, the Perizzites, the Ammonites, the Amalekites,
and the Philistines.
To recapture
our former greatness and prosperity attained by a
national strategy of invincible self-defense; peace,
commerce, and honest friendship with all nations; and,
entangling alliances with none, we need only to follow
the Constitution’s entrustment of decisions on war or
peace exclusively to Congress.
The
Constitution’s authors were intellectual and
philosophical giants that have never been equaled. In
comparison, today’s leaders are pygmies.
Should we
follow the giants or the pygmies?
Bruce Fein
(born March 12, 1947) is an American lawyer who
specializes in constitutional and international law.
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2016 The Washington Times, LLC
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