Monday, November 3, 2014

I Declare War on Not Declaring War


The structure of our constitution is what has made it work so well.  I believe we are due for some structural work on our constitution, but in one area we just need a refresher course on what's in the Constitution and why.  War is one of the areas where the Constitution is doing just fine.  The problem is that we aren't following the Constitution.  

We have evolved from a clear form of conflict: war, as declared by Congress and executed by the President... to an executive-driven, slippery-sloping set of never-ending "police actions," conflicts, and coalition engagements.  The end result has been that our nation views the decision to go to war as an executive decision, and there are many, many reasons why the Framers did not want that to happen.

The Framers were right about giving the power to declare war to Congress.  And Congress needs to take back that power.

One of the frequent arguments in favor of our current, executive-driven form of international action is that the Framers lived in a world in which time was experienced very differently than we experience it today.


The Battle of New Orleans

Example: The battle for which Andrew Jackson is best known - The Battle of New Orleans in the War of 1812 - happened 2 weeks after his side had already won the war, but word hadn't gotten to Jackson yet.

And that's the type of time the Constitutional Convention was thinking about when it gave the power to declare war to Congress.

Decisions today can be made with communications links between the situation room and the field, directly.  That speed and alacrity with which a Commander-in-Chief can now respond to outside threats is important, but it's not what a declaration of war is about.  And that's not what the slide towards greater executive authority, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, is about.



If you look at the political history of the world, it's easy to see that human beings tend to default to strong, unitary leadership models.  And in some ways, that's understandable: unitary leaders provide a degree of clarity (at least, when the leader is good).  But as our political philosophy developed and as our experiences with all manner of unitary leadership grew into a history of examples, we moved more towards representation and democracy.  Democracy grew because we grew to believe that all people deserve to have a say in their government - that the government is the extension of our will as a people, and in order for that be true, the people must hold the reins.


Democracy is awesome.  But democracy requires work, out of all of us.  "Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown."  And there is an extent to which our political will follows a psychological desire to shirk decisions and work where possible.  Such is the case with the the great deference shown in modern politics to presidents with war.  Yeah, I just called us lazy.  Deal with it.


Going to war is a hard decision.  We've tried to make it easier over time, by:


  • Getting rid of the draft - thereby making it so only a small percentage of our people actively feel the hardships of active duty;
  • Privatizing a lot of our military work - which makes the numbers feel smaller, the losses feel private/corporate rather than national/American, and the profiteering somehow more seemly as it's done directly by corporations; and

One other way we've tried to make war an easier prospect for most Americans is by separating war from our representatives - the people who are the closest to our vote.


When we don't have to declare war, our representatives don't have to take a stand on the issue.  They don't have to have long, specific debates about strategy, consequences, allocation of military resources, political history, cost, and achievable goals.  And Congress has tried its hardest never to have these conversations in an official way.  Last year, President Obama asked for Congressional authorization to take action in Syria after weeks of members of Congress talking to every media source they could find about how the President should act.  Congress never voted on it, because the President reached an accord with Russia on the matter before Congress would vote.  This year, when ISIS/ISIL became a more direct threat, Members of Congress have been all over the airwaves demanding action, yet Congress decided to go home and campaign instead of staying in town to vote on the matter.  Speaker Boehner, after specifically saying that the President should/could act and needed Congressional approval to do so, passed off his own House's responsibilities by arguing that the President needed to provide the language to Congress before a vote could be held.  The very idea that Congress - designed to be the primary source of power by the Framers - could so cavalierly pass off all responsibility and decision-making authority to the executive without political consequence shows just how deeply entrenched our deference to presidents in war has become.


One other area of Congressional power - as designed by the Framers - is the power of the purse.  But Congress and the Bush Administration made the power of the purse over war spending as opaque as possible.  4 devices - let's call them tricks - were used to mask the over $1 trillion cost of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq:




"Since the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, Congress has appropriated $331 billion for military operations in Afghanistan, Iraq, and elsewhere. Of that amount, $301 billion, or 91%, has been provided either in supplemental appropriations bills or as additional “emergency” funding in separate titles of annual defense appropriations acts."   
Why did they do this?  Because the budget process for "on-budget" spending - those built into the Administration's yearly budget - is involved and has built-in committee-of-jurisdiction scrutiny (which is to say, the people who look at the requests have greater expertise about defense budgeting than those not on the relevant subcommittee).  Emergency spending, by contrast, has built-in spending controls that are relatively weak and ineffective.


  • They bundled spending bills into omnibus spending bills.  In Washington, an omnibus bill is created when deadlines are looming (vacations, district work periods, fiscal quarters, etc.) and either there is not the time for the debate and scrutiny of many bills or the leadership does not have the votes on one or more portions of the bill unless they are bundled together (often along with local pork and/or member projects). The physically-larger the bill, the less detailed knowledge Members of Congress will have on it.  Members, just like anybody, have limited time - and their ability to actually digest what's in a bill is substantially more limited when the final drafting of a bill happens at the last minute, by a few staffers (usually in the leadership employ), and is distributed hours before a vote.  This means that Members and their staff often have to rely on summaries by Leadership to understand the bill they are voting on.  So the representatives themselves often don't know details about the bill.  Then, in these large bills, the press have a lot to cover, so some things slide below the press notice - and the press is the part (besides a vote) that would help the public understand what's going on in Washington.  This means that the overall bill is a big enough deal that individual Members can feel comfortable voting for large amounts of spending without scrutiny because the train is rolling and stopping it would cause problems for the continuation of government functions.

  • They borrowed a whole lot of money.  In most times of war, taxes have gone up.  During the Bush Administration, taxes went down.  And when I say they went down, they went down by well over a trillion dollars - many on tax cuts that are essentially permanent because reauthorization of them is a far easier vote than a vote that can be spun as "raising taxes" in a political ad.  Some of this tax cutting happened before 9/11, but some happened afterwards - and because the party in charge of the whole government - the Republicans - were looking to make long-term structural tax changes (notably to substantially lower the rate at which we tax investment income - making it far lower than the rate at which we tax income from work), they kept the tax cuts coming, even while approving lots and lots of spending for the wars.  This Tax-Cut-and-Borrow form of budgeting caused our economic downturn to be far worse, and it made the instant spending involved in mounting two wars seem far less onerous - and to therefore feel like less of a burden we the voters were choosing to undertake.




Figure A: Actual and Projected Direct Budgetary Costs of US Military Operations, by Activity
(in billions of 2008 dollars)
page10image6008
Category
2001–09*
2009–18**
Total (2001–18)
Military Operations (DoD)***
816
315–694
1,131–1,509
Indigenous Security Forces
40
42
82
Foreign Assistance
and Diplomatic Activities
45
20
65
Veterans’ Affairs***
3
40–62
43–65
Total***
904
416–817
1,289–1,721
* 2009 funding included in these figures includes only that portion enacted in June 2008.
** 2009 funding included in these figures includes only that portion projected to be appropriated after June 2008.

*** Low-end estimates assume that US deployments will decline from roughly 200,000 today to 30,000 by 2011, while high-end estimates assume those deployments will fall to 75,000 by 2013.
Source: CSBA estimates based on Amy Belasco, “The Costs of the Iraq, Afghanistan, and Other Global War on Terror Operations Since 9/11,” p.18; “Additional Information About the Policy Alternative in CBO’s Budget and Economic Outlook: An Update for Continued Spending in Support of the War on Terrorism,” CBO, September 2008 and Peter Orszag, CBO Director, “The Cost of War: A Comment on Stigliz-Bilmes,” CBO Director’s Blog, April 8, 2008, http://cboblog.cbo.gov.





So what is the net effect of these 4 tactics?  By using "emergency spending" or "omnibus spending" bills to do most of the heavy lifting on defense spending, our representatives don't actually have to vote on - and therefore justify - the actual costs of war, because those costs are buried in large bills or not added into budget calculations (when they are classified separately, as "emergency spending").


According to the CSBA study, the Administration has fudged the war's true costs in two ways. Borrowing money to fund the wars is one way of conducting them on the cheap, at least in the short term. But just as pernicious has been the Administration's novel way of budgeting for them. Previous wars were funded through the annual appropriations process, with emergency spending — which gets far less congressional scrutiny — used only for the initial stages of a conflict. But the Bush Administration relied on such supplemental appropriations to fund the wars until 2008, seven years after invading Afghanistan and five years after storming Iraq.
"For these wars, we have relied on supplemental appropriations for far longer than in the case of past conflicts," says Steven Kosiak of the CSBA, one of Washington's top defense-budget analysts. "Likewise, we have relied on borrowing to cover more of these costs than we have in earlier wars — which will likely increase the ultimate price we have to pay." That refusal to spell out the full cost can lead to unwise spending increases elsewhere in the federal budget or unwarranted tax cuts. "A sound budgeting process forces policymakers to recognize the true costs of their policy choices," Kosiak adds. "Not only did we not raise taxes, we cut taxes and significantly expanded spending."

We have collectively made war too easy to wage.  We have removed ourselves from culpability for what our government does by reducing our individual power and our individual knowledge about the decisions being made in our name - and the consequences of these decisions.  And that is decidedly not what the structure of our Constitution built.  So we should go back.

If Members of Congress have to vote on whether to declare war and to vote specifically on funding it, they will do a better job at representing us, at asking better questions and demanding better answers, and all of that will make it easier for we the people to understand what those decisions are and whether we agree with them - and to vote accordingly.

We should go back to declaring war, even with the attendant difficulties in naming an enemy in an era of non-state/organizational warfare.  The difficulties of naming a foe pale in comparison to the problems created by waging war lightly, and without a full examination of the costs (both human and monetary) in the sunlight, by our representatives.






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