On Iraq, Congress Cedes All the Authority to Bush

The United States is teetering on the brink of war with Iraq. Edgy citizens brace for terrorist retaliation. The United Nations is consumed by the looming conflict. The Turkish and British parliaments are riven over U.S. war plans.

But back in “the world’s greatest deliberative body,” the U.S. Senate spent most of last week mired in a partisan brawl over a single federal judge. The House, meanwhile, squabbled over a tax bill laden with special-interest goodies and passed a resolution mourning the death of Mister Rogers.

The disconnect between Congress’ parochial preoccupations and the sense of historic peril abroad is a striking reminder that U.S. lawmakers have put themselves squarely on the sidelines of impending war against Iraq.

In voting last fall to give President Bush unchecked power to decide whether and when to launch an assault on Iraq, Congress essentially delegated its constitutional power to declare war. That’s not unprecedented, but analysts say Congress’s role in the Iraq debate has been more deferential to the president than in past conflicts such as the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

“The Senate’s role has become cheerleading,” said Joel Silbey, a political historian at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y. Its members “seem to succumb to presidential predominance in a very supine way.”

That pains no one more than the Senate’s senior Democrat, Robert C. Byrd of West Virginia. He is the self-appointed guardian of the Senate’s constitutional prerogatives and traditions -- the chamber that is supposed to have the largest role in foreign policy and that has been the scene of many great debates about issues of war and peace.

“We stand passively mute ... paralyzed by our own uncertainty, seemingly stunned by the sheer turmoil of events,” Byrd said in a recent Senate speech. “We are truly ‘sleepwalking through history.’ ”

Byrd’s speech spread like wildfire around the world through newspapers and the Internet.

Stung by such criticism, Senate leaders set aside three hours Friday morning for senators to give speeches on Iraq.

Democratic leaders -- and the party’s presidential hopefuls -- have begun to step up their criticism of Bush’s prewar diplomacy in the face of crumbling support at the United Nations.

But war critics say the speeches and the rhetoric are too little too late, coming months after Congress gave Bush the go-ahead for military action.

“Clearly senators would prefer to talk about the war rather than do anything,” said John Isaacs, president of the Council for a Livable World, an arms-control advocate.

Even observers less partisan than Byrd, who was on the losing end of the 77-23 vote authorizing war, agree that the Senate’s role in the Iraq debate is a pale shadow of past periods of more robust leadership.

Norman Ornstein, a congressional scholar who started work as a Senate staff member in 1969, said he arrived when the chamber was ringing with debate about the war in Vietnam -- and had a sense of pride about its role in foreign policy.

“There was still a sense of the grandeur of the body and the importance of the body,” Ornstein said. “To look at it today, the Senate is struggling to find an appropriate role to play. I think you’d be hard-pressed to suggest the Senate is a great debating body -- on anything.”

Supporters of Bush’s Iraq policy are unapologetic about Congress’ focus on matters close to home as the nation edges toward war.

“We shouldn’t have a moratorium on domestic issues,” said House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Texas).

And Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Richard G. Lugar (R-Ind.) said the absence of sustained debate on Iraq reflects the fact that most lawmakers still support Bush’s policy.

“Sen. Byrd has strong feelings, but I don’t think that’s close to a majority of senators’ view,” Lugar said.

While the president traditionally dominates U.S. foreign policy, it is Congress that has the constitutional power to declare war. However, the last time Congress approved a formal declaration of war was for World War II. Ever since -- in Korea and Vietnam, as well as lesser military actions -- presidents have deployed troops without a formal declaration.

The White House has usually sought some form of congressional endorsement, such as the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution that escalated U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the 1991 resolution authorizing the use of force against Iraq after it invaded Kuwait.

When Congress last October debated the Iraq resolution, it showed less willingness to challenge the president than when it approved, by a much narrower margin, the 1991 resolution. In the recent vote, war critics say too many senators swallowed their reservations about attacking Iraq and supported the resolution because they feared the political consequences of opposing a popular president shortly before the November midterm elections.

Former Sen. Paul Simon (D-Ill.), who opposes going to war with Iraq, said the skittishness showed how far the Senate has strayed from its textbook role as the chamber of statesmen who can rise above transient political pressures.

“The Senate just caved in,” he said. “That’s not what the Senate was intended to be and to do.”

Lawmakers are now confronting the consequences of having months ago authorized Bush to use military force against Iraq. They may now have qualms, but with hundreds of thousands of troops already massed in the Persian Gulf, they have little power to change Bush’s course.

“Congress by that vote relegated itself to the sidelines and handed [the decision about going to war] lock, stock and barrel to the president,” Byrd said.

Some war critics have called for another vote on authorizing the use of force because so much has changed since the October vote: U.N. weapons inspections have been underway for weeks; Iraq has begun dismantling some of its weapons; key European allies have opposed U.S. war plans; Turkey has refused to allow U.S. troops on its soil; and prospects for support from the U.N. are questionable.

Even some Democrats who voted for the resolution acknowledge that they never imagined that international support for the U.S. would be as weak as it is now.

“Our situation has put us into a more isolated position than I ever anticipated,” Senate Minority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said last week.

Still, the Senate clearly has no interest in revisiting the vote. Even war critics acknowledge the outcome probably would not be much different. Daschle has discouraged antiwar Democratic senators from pursuing a vote.

The paucity of outspoken dissent so frustrated former Sen. James Abourezk (D-S.D.) that he recently organized a group of 12 former senators to issue a statement opposing an invasion of Iraq.

“They aren’t doing a ... thing,” Abourezk said. He harked back to his days in the Senate where he joined in “robust” opposition to the war in Vietnam with other senators, such as Democrats Frank Church of Idaho, J. William Fulbright of Arkansas and George S. McGovern of South Dakota.

To be sure, the Vietnam War began with virtually no dissent in Congress. Only two senators voted against the Gulf of Tonkin resolution. But as the war dragged on and large numbers of U.S. troops died, the Senate became a forum for vocal and passionate opposition -- especially from members of President Johnson’s own Democratic Party.

“Every senator in this chamber is partly responsible for sending 50,000 young Americans to an early grave,” McGovern said in a 1970 speech. “This chamber reeks of blood.”

By contrast, there is already significant opposition among the U.S. public and internationally to going to war with Iraq, even before a shot has been fired.

Congress likely would become more willing to question Bush’s Iraq policy if casualties started to mount and lawmakers began to weigh the costs and consequences of the decision they have authorized him to make.

“If anything goes wrong, the opposition will develop almost instantaneously,” said Thomas Mann, an expert on Congress at the Brookings Institution think tank. “There will be battles over how to pay the cost of what we do when the guns quiet.”

The Senate’s deference to Bush so far is a reflection, in part, of broader forces that have made lawmakers more cautious about speaking out on foreign policy.

Democrats in the post-Vietnam era have labored to shed their party’s image as being soft on defense.

Some also concluded that the significant Democratic opposition to 1991’s Persian Gulf War resolution was a political mistake. And standing up to Bush is seen as particularly perilous in the post-Sept. 11 era. It is telling that the foremost Senate opponents of going to war are old-timers such as Byrd and Democrat Edward M. Kennedy of Massachusetts, who hold two of the nation’s safest seats.

Increasingly, members of both parties have come to view leadership on foreign policy as politically risky and have focused more on domestic and local issues.

“The prudent course of political action is to just not say too much,” said Sen. Charles Hagel (R-Neb.), one of the few Republicans to voice skepticism about Bush’s approach to Iraq.

Byrd argues that something even more fundamental has made his colleagues timid. He believes that over the 50 years he has spent in Congress, members of the Senate have lost their sense of institutional identity as a counterweight to the president.

“In the days since Sept. 11, we have seen power shift to the executive branch,” Byrd said. “Without a Congress willing to stand up for its prerogatives and without a public that understands the importance of equal branches of government and separation of powers, that shift will gain the speed of a downhill truck.”