Blank Checks and No Balances

Some thoughts on the depressing fact that one of the areas where strong congressional oversight is most needed is one area in which the president has the freest hand:

Whatever one thinks of the constitutional issues, Congress’s abdication of responsibility is a bad thing. The current institutional equilibrium has led to a perverse place where it’s enormously difficult for the president to appoint people to fill minor executive branch positions but he can bomb anything he likes with almost no prospect of congressional pushback. This is the wrong way around. Even if Congress thinks it’s washed its hands of responsibility through inaction, the legislative body shares the blame if there’s an attack on Syria that goes badly.

Particularly striking is the contrast with Great Britain, where the normally deferential Commons learned its lesson from Blair’s behavior on Iraq and decided not to take Cameron’s word for it. An attack on Syria would also be nearly unilateral in terms of allies, making it an even worse idea than it is already.  And while I understand the logic of the executive needed a much freer hand in military affairs given the inefficiency of congressional procedures and the potential need to reply in the case of emergencies or immediate threats, this obviously has nothing to do with Syria.

This point from the Matt Duss piece I link to is also crucial:

The first case is fairly easy to dismiss. Supporters of military intervention tend to place a great deal of weight on “credibility,” which is almost exclusively defined as “a willingness to bomb something.” As this argument goes, the United States needs to use deadly force to maintain its table image, to use a poker term. If we get caught bluffing, other players will be more likely to call or raise us in the future. But there’s just not a lot of real-world evidence that one’s table image is so easily lost or maintained. As political scientist Jonathan Mercer, author of Reputation and International Politics, wrote in Foreign Affairs in May, it’s impossible to know what conclusions America’s adversaries will draw from specific action or inaction. “They might think that Obama has no credibility, that he is, in fact, resolute, or that he is driven by other U.S. interests. Whatever conclusion they come to will be driven by their own beliefs and interests.”