A Plea to the Next Congress

In Virginia, Election Day dawned as beautiful as is possible for early November, perfectly embodying the “mellow fruitfulness” assigned by Keats to this most wonderful of seasons. I write having just returned from my local polling place, where the mild autumn weather combined with a tableau of civic participation—a PTA bake sale, cordial representatives of both parties smilingly manning their respective booths—to produce an archetypically American scene.

Yet all is not well in our republic. By the time you read this, control of Congress should be clear; and unless the polls have been spectacularly off, at least the House will have been carried by insurgent Dems capitalizing on popular fury over, inter alia, the cost of living and the ongoing Iran imbroglio (my own low-conviction guess for the Senate is a 50–50 tie). [Editor’s Note: It was in fact a bloodbath for Republicans on all fronts.] Whatever the precise balance of forces, there is an urgent and unfortunately herculean task at hand for the next batch of lawmakers. This is nothing less than the resuscitation of their institution: The rescue of Congress from the impotence and disgrace into which it has latterly sunk. 

I should say here that I don’t expect the 120th Congress to accomplish this work. But I would be remiss in my duties as a columnist if I failed to give appealing to the civic sense of our newly-elected representatives the old college try. 

The place to start is war. We have now entered the ninth month of an asinine and unwinnable conflict prosecuted by the White House in open defiance of the Constitution—which, for those who have forgotten, sagely reserves to Congress the power to declare war. And for all the casuistry and careful word-games of executive branch lawyers, for all the attempts by cabinet officials and congressional leadership to cloud and complicate the obvious, for all the recent protestations of the president himself—usually admirably forthright about the essential warrishness of the war—that this is “not a war” or a “soft war,” it is, in fact, a war. Its commencement without congressional authorization was unlawful; its termination by congressional action is essential if our legislature is to regain its constitutional role (not to mention its institutional self-respect). The 120th Congress must address itself to the question posed by Henry Clay nearly two centuries ago: “Does the [war] power belong to the Nation, to the collective wisdom of the Nation in Congress assembled, or is it vested solely in a single functionary of the government?” 

Any effectual answer to the Great Pacificator’s question will require Congress to pursue an “all of the above” approach. War powers resolutions, symbolic though they are, should be a part of this; so, too, should NDAA provisions requiring the cessation of combat operations and the removal of U.S. troops. But most important will be the wielding of the power of the purse—the war machine is kept going by appropriations, and Congress should condition any future funding on the observance of the law. It must be prepared to turn off the money spigot no matter how loudly the Pentagon screams; something resembling the Vietnam-era Case-Church Amendment (which prevented any money given to the Pentagon from being used to fight in Indochina) should absolutely be a part of this year’s defense appropriations act.

On that note, appropriations qua appropriations present another theater in which congressional action is essential. The past two years have seen the executive branch essentially write its own budget. It has made a point of refusing to provide congressional appropriators with the information they need to make informed decisions. It has abandoned the negotiation appropriate to coequal branches of government, preferring instead to dictate terms from a position of superiority. And when it comes to particularly sensitive matters, the White House has even gotten Congress to abandon its regular appropriations process in favor of reconciliation, a procedure meant to help balance the federal account books but which is instead being used to ram through partisan priorities with budget-busting implications. Fiscal hawks on the right, who might be expected to serve as a check on such recklessness, have wilted in the face of executive pressure, swallowing their pride and principles to vote as the president orders—even when that means supporting a bill that will add $4.7 trillion (with a “t”) to the national debt by 2035. This state of affairs has to end; the next Congress should resolve to return to the regular appropriations process and formulate its budget as though it were an independent locus of political power rather than a craven instrument of another branch.

Most difficult of all, those who will make the trek to Capitol Hill for their swearing-in come January should try to make their institution less patently ridiculous. This means ending the goofy hearings staged purely for the purpose of creating viral clips; it means conducting themselves with a modicum of decency and self-respect; it means actually working to pass legislation and ending the practice of taking off half the year (and a hundred similar evasions of actual work besides).

Yes, I can hear the laughter. As I said at the outset, there is little chance we see appreciable movement anytime soon. But until we all start expecting—and demanding—as much from our representatives, we will continue to suffer the consequences of a clownish and castrated Congress.