The New Yorker:

Past conflicts eroded Congress’s ability to decide when to go to war. Donald Trump’s attack on Iran destroyed it.

By Ruth Marcus

On April 22, 1793, President George Washington issued a Proclamation of Neutrality in the war that had just been declared between France and Britain. The United States, Washington decreed, “should with sincerity and good faith adopt and pursue a conduct friendly and impartial toward the belligerent Powers.” Washington’s action raised a question: Where did the President get off declaring the country’s neutrality? After all, the Constitution, which had been written merely six years earlier, entrusted to Congress the power to declare war. Didn’t Washington’s actions infringe on that authority? The dispute generated an exchange over the proper scope of Presidential power, conducted in the pages of a Philadelphia newspaper, between Alexander Hamilton and James Madison. Hamilton, writing as Pacificus, reaffirmed his typically muscular reading of executive authority. A “correct and well informed mind will discern at once,” he asserted, that such discretion “of course must belong to the Executive.” After all, he continued, “The general doctrine then of our constitution is, that the executive power of the Nation is vested in the President; subject only to the exceptions and qu[a]lifications which are expressed in the instrument.”

Madison pushed back, under the pen name Helvidius, after the Roman statesman who argued that the emperor should act only with the consent of the Senate. His concern extended beyond the precise question of the neutrality proclamation; Madison offered a more general admonition against bestowing war powers on a single, potentially flawed individual. “In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department,” Madison, the primary author of the document, observed. Were that decision placed in the hands of the executive, he warned, “the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man”—not, perhaps, “the prodigy of many centuries” but a more imperfect leader, “such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy.” The reason, Madison said, was clear: “War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. . . . In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.”

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