After President Trump bombed Iran, Democrats in Congress declared the action illegal. But it follows a long history of increased presidential control of military operations along with congressional deference and abrogation of war powers. How did we get here? Casey Dominguez finds that although the founders bestowed war powers with Congress, by the Spanish-American war legislators had expanded their view of the president’s powers and begun applying a more expansive view to their own party’s presidents. The role of nationalism, the rise of American power, and polarization all have echoes today.
Guest: Casey Dominguez, University of San Diego
Studies: Commander in Chief
Transcript
Matt Grossmann: How the President gained war powers, this week on The Science of Politics. For the Niskanen Center, I’m Matt Grossman.
After President Trump bombed Iran, Democrats in Congress declared the action illegal. But it follows a long history of increased presidential control of military operations, deference and abrogation of war powers. How did we get here? This week, I talked to Casey Dominguez at the University of San Diego about her Kansas book, Commander in Chief. She finds that although the founders bestowed war powers with Congress, by the Spanish-American war legislators had expanded their view of the President’s powers and become partisan in applying a more expansive view to their own party’s presidents. The role of nationalism, the rise of American power and polarization all have echoes today.
Our conversation focuses not only on these pivotal historical moments, but also on how presidential power has evolved since. Dominguez is also an astute observer of the Trump presidencies, so we also cover authoritarian shifts under Trump and the implications of evolving constitutional interpretation for inter-branch power in our current moment. I think you’ll find our conversation informative.
So tell us about the main findings and takeaways from your book, Commander in Chief.
Casey Dominguez: Happy to, thanks for asking. So my motivating question after years of teaching about the presidency was there’s this pretty strong consensus that constitutional war powers changed and became more presidentially dominated over time, particularly in the late 20th century. And I was really interested in how that happened. How did Congress give up that authority? And that’s the motivation. And then the research question was how did members of Congress interpret the Commander in Chief Clause during the pre-modern period or the original constitutional order?
So with my undergrads, I found more than 2,800 congressional speeches from the founding to 1917 in which a member of Congress referred to the Commander in Chief Clause in the debates of Congress. And the book is basically a thick description of how members of Congress talked about the President’s War power authority as connected to the Commander in Chief Clause.
And overall, I confirm what other people have found about the original constitutional order, that members of Congress use really consistent language. And they said throughout this period that the Commander in Chief Clause does confer some authority on the President. That he can command subordinate officers, that those commands can include moving troops within national territory, that the Commander in Chief is responsible for applying discipline as written by Congress. Congress writes the Uniform Code of Military Justice, and as Congress writes those laws, the President executes them. And that he commands the state militias. And also for most of the speeches I looked at over most of this time period, there’s no authority whatsoever connected to the Commander in Chief Clause to initiate any kind of hostilities. And that’s more or less what other people have found as well.
When you look at all of the discussions of the Commander in Chief Clause, you see that it was originally understood as just a title. It’s a military title that other generals or admirals might hold. It carries with it, members of Congress for 100 years assumed that it carried with it the kind of authority that might go to any other kind of high-ranking military officer. So yeah, it confers authority to tell the troops to advance, to take that hill, to burn that city. But other military officers can’t start wars, there’s no political authority, and so that’s how they also understood the Commander in Chief Clause, that there’s no political authority associated with it, that it’s just a military title.
Throughout this period, I think people talk a lot about how partisanship is affecting the interpretation and enforcement of constitutional provisions today, but that has literally always been the case. You can trace it all the way back to the Federalists and the Democratic Republicans. It’s just the case that members of Congress in the President’s party, or those that have policy preferences that align with the President tend to argue that the Commander in Chief Clause gives the President more discretion. And those that are in the opposition party have always tended to argue that the Commander in Chief Clause gives the President less discretion.
And specifically that in the data that I looked at in the speeches, you can trace that there are different versions of what the Commander in Chief Clause means. There’s a version of it that refers to George Washington as Commander in Chief of the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War and as President, in that the President has, that Congress actually has the authority to tell the President exactly what to do, how to execute discipline, which ships to send where, the kinds of orders that the Continental Congress gave to George Washington. This model says, “Look, Congress is in charge of war. And the President just executes Congress’s wishes.”
And people in the opposition party have always tended to, or at least in the 19th century, tended to take that position that if they didn’t like the President, they didn’t like his policies, they tended to be in favor of more robust congressional authority.
And there was another version of it as well. And this version of the, I call them constitutional scripts, was built on the idea of what commanders can typically do on a battlefield in the laws of nations. And it tended to say that on the battlefield, a commander is unregulatable by the government, by Congress. And so people who were in the President’s party or favored his policies tended to say, “Look, once Congress starts a war, it can’t micromanage what the President does.” And so, those two rhetorical, logical arguments tended to be held by people who were in the President’s party or in the opposition party then.
And then the other conclusion of the book is that all of those kinds of rhetorical scripts came to an abrupt halt in about 1898. And members of Congress at that time started talking about the Commander in Chief as a patriot and as someone to whom members of Congress owed a duty. They said, “The commander in chief authority gets framed as patriotic,” and deferring to the Commander in Chief’s wishes, which is obviously something that those in the President’s party would prefer. But even those in the opposition party start to adopt this sort of nationalist rhetoric. Well, he’s the national representative. He represents the flag. He’s nationally elected. He speaks for the nation. He’s an expert. And so members of Congress start to express their duty to defer to the Commander in Chief.
And that coincides with this period of, there’s this 20-year period where we’ve got the Spanish-American War and then a bunch of little wars imperialism as the US territory expands and as the US starts to be more aggressive toward Latin America and Asia and other places. And Congress is for many, I think all of those years up until World War One, it’s unified government. It’s either the Republicans first and then the Democrats. And so both parties start to habitually adopt that rhetoric.
And so yeah, it’s a lot of thick description and I think it does have some lessons for how we should think about constitutional interpretation and the growth of presidential war powers.
Matt Grossmann: So you said it’s consistent with the most views of the founding and first part of the US history. But we tend to have the perspective that presidential powers in war have increased much more recently than that you come up with. So tell us about what you think the conventional wisdom is and how far we can go in saying that this has been true for a much longer time?
Casey Dominguez: Well, I certainly wouldn’t contest the idea that some major things happened in the middle of the 20th century. A lot of folks who talk about the rise of presidential war powers will point to the 1950s especially as a time period when Congress did not step up and tell Harry Truman that he couldn’t fight the Korean War, even though there was no congressional authorization, whatever, for the Korean War, which turned out to be a major war with tens of thousands of casualties. And Congress paid for it but didn’t authorize it. And it was a fig leaf that it was a UN operation and the law that they had just passed to authorize the UN didn’t permit this kind of action without congressional authority. And so a lot of folks have pointed to that.
And also the buildup at that time of the National Security Council, and the creation of the CIA, and the ability of the President to secretly use the CIA to overthrow other governments and the buildup of a national security apparatus and an incredibly large and powerful standing military after World War Two, including nuclear weapons, that changed the President’s ability to give orders that would initiate hostilities just because there were bases all over the world and there were planes that could fly all over the world in a minute, and there were nuclear weapons aimed at the United States, and sort of all of that caused war powers to be more presidentially dominated.
And for sure, I wouldn’t disagree with that. But that doesn’t really answer the question of why Congress steps back. Just because the US military is more powerful doesn’t necessarily mean that the President has political authority under the Constitution to initiate hostilities. So that seemed to me to be something separate. And it was something that I think a lot of that same rhetoric of being Congress couldn’t support, wouldn’t want to constrain Harry Truman because they wouldn’t want to be seen as supporting the Communists during the Red Scare. And all of that political rhetoric and nationalism was also present in the 1950s, but it was present earlier. And so I think there’s certainly something about partisanship and nationalism both that have always been a source of presidential discretion and war powers and that has gotten maybe more institutionalized over time.
Matt Grossmann: So give us the context of the Spanish-American War and nationalism around that period. What did that mean at the time? And why was that an inflection point?
Casey Dominguez: I certainly didn’t go into this project knowing very much about this Spanish-American war. It just emerged that this was a time when members of Congress started to really change how they talked about the Commander in Chief Clause.
But what was happening at that point was a confluence of a bunch of things. The presidency and presidential, the President’s relationship to the public was changing. William James Bryan went out and really campaigned for president for the first time in the 1890s, in 1896, and there was emerging the idea that the President was nationally elected. Whereas before, presidents were certainly chosen by popular vote, choosing the popular vote, choosing the electors, that goes all the way back to the 1830s. But the idea that presidents would speak to the public and make promises to the public and speak to and perhaps speak for-
Speak to the public and make promises to the public, and speak to, and perhaps speak for the public, was something that emerges because of the media environment and because of the possibility of national train travel. All of that is kind of changing around the turn of the 20th century, at the same time that the frontier has closed, and there is rhetoric around, the United States has reached the end of the continent and filled it in with states and how are we going to expand markets? And so there’s ideas from Admiral Mahan and others, that we’re close to Teddy Roosevelt and to Republicans in Congress about maybe having a bigger navy, in particular, to try to protect American trade and perhaps bully other countries into trading with us the way that we want them to and that kind of thing.
And then at the same time, there’s also the generation of veterans that had survived the Civil War and their families had become politically organized under the Grand Army of the Republic in the 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, and become close to the Republican Party in arguing for veterans’ benefits, and waving the flag, and associating the flag with supporting veterans, as a political tool to win veterans benefits. That also then becomes associated with, supporting the troops is supporting the president, and that becomes tied together in this time period. And so there’s a lot going on there about the flag, about America abroad, about the president being a national representative, that I think coalesces in this moment to sort of juice up the president’s authority over war and peace.
Matt Grossmann: So relative to other countries, how does the US stand out in giving its executive war powers? And given that the meaning of this constitutional text changed over time so much, how important was us having this long-running constitutional text in constraining or enabling the president?
Casey Dominguez: So you asked two questions there, and I’m going to dodge the first one because I can’t say that I’m enough of a comparativist to know exactly what other constitutions do in designated war powers. But I’ll jump onto the second question, which is how much does the constitutional text matter? And I think it did matter, I think the constitutional text mattered as long as it was clear to everyone what the words meant. The Commander-in-Chief Clause was understood by members of Congress, by textbooks, and apparently, mostly, by presidents themselves, to not be a source of political authority. That Congress was understood to be the body that could initiate hostilities, and presidents were not understood to have that power because they understood the Commander-in-Chief Clause as a military title. One of the things that… I stopped coding in 1917 because members of Congress start to talk about the commander-in-chief as a synonym for the president.
And we hear that today. People will talk about, “Well, the commander-in-chief signed the reconciliation bill.” Well, the president signed the reconciliation bill, but those terms have become synonymous, and they didn’t use to be. That term was constitutionally specific and people understood what it meant, but meanings change over time. And I think there’s another important part to that question, how much does it matter in constraining and enabling presidents? The other part of the constitutional order in the 19th century was that members of Congress and presidents understood that presidential power was defensive and they meant defensive, they didn’t mean like, “Preemptive war is defensive.” No, they meant like if someone is firing at you, you can fire back, that’s it. If you want to do something else then… And the Price Cases did clarify that, that if someone else starts a war on you, then you don’t need Congress to declare war, the war has begun. Although Congress did not understand that to mean that the president couldn’t also be told what to do during the Civil War.
But that idea of defense is a really loaded term, because, for example, there’s nothing in the data that I collected, and not much anyway, about the century-long use of force, mostly done by the army, against native peoples along the American frontier and in the West. And that didn’t raise the question of presidential war powers, I think, for members of Congress, because they understood that that was defense. It was defense for the army to defend white settlers that were taking the land of native peoples. And so that is a very loaded, racially constructed, idea. And Teddy Roosevelt used those kinds of racially loaded ideas to take over markets, and there were multiple occupations of Nicaragua in the nineteen-teens under several different presidents, because those people were understood to not be advanced enough to be able to manage their banking system and protect American contracts, or whatever. And so there’s racial coding of what means offense and what means defense, that I think is also a really important part of how the text gets interpreted. So I think the text did matter, but it’s not the only language and concept that has mattered.
Matt Grossmann: So if we take the long-term perspective, we can sort of draw an upward line overall in terms of presidential power, but you’re telling us a more specific trajectory here. So I’m just wondering how that interacts with the overall growth of presidential power. Obviously, we’ve for a long time had this idea that it’s greater in foreign policy overall. Can we say that foreign policy power of the president derives from this rise of war powers, or that it precedes that? And how much was the growth of congressional deference to the president in war a part of a broader growth in deference across the policy spectrum?
Casey Dominguez: I think that’s a great question that I don’t have a great answer to, but I’ll give a partial answer. And that is, I don’t think that presidential… I think that Congress kind of constructs the presidential bureaucracy for the executive branch, for domestic policymaking, first. So John Dearborn’s work is focused on the rise of Congress’s understanding of the president as a national representative, and how Congress builds presidential power with the Budget Act in 1921, and other things, and into the growth of the state in the 1940s and 1950s, that that precedes the buildup of what we think of today as 1950s and thereafter presidential war powers. But, I do think the presidential nationalism, the rallying around the flag, the president is commander-in-chief is due the deference of Congress that might have come first. And so I think there’s been an interaction between the two that would be interesting to learn more about.
Matt Grossmann: So you declined my invitation to be a comparativist. Now I’m going to try with international relations scholar, and we’ll see how that goes. But what some people, I think, would tell this story, as you mentioned, this is a part of the rise of US imperialism and the greater role of the United States in the world. And eventually by the time we get to the 1950s, of course, its role is kind of a global superpower. So to what extent is this kind of an inevitable, here’s what happens when you become more of a global power, versus this derived from more specific domestic politics in the US?
Casey Dominguez: I think that is a great question. I’ll start specific and I’ll get to your question, I promise. But if you look at the way members of Congress talked about the Laws of Nations in the 19th century, as they understood it, they used that idea that commanders on the battlefield can do these kinds of things to argue for broader presidential power. And I think, of course, all of their arguments, their argument about George Washington wasn’t a very good historical analogy either, but the writings that they were drawing on Grotius and Patel and others from the 19th century and the 18th century, they’re drawing on ideas about how nation states should behave ethically in wartime. They’re not drawing on arguments about constitutionalism and whether the legislative branch or the executive branch should be able to act.
And there’s a conflation of those two things. And something that I also wonder about and am not enough of an international relations scholar to be able to really talk about, but it’s something that I do want to learn more about, and that is the degree to which the international state system really is built for democracies. Is there enough of an assumption that it might take time, there might be disagreement, and if Article 5 of NATO is invoked, technically the treaty and the Congressional Enabling Act say that Congress is responsible for choosing whether to fulfill the obligations under that treaty, not the president.
And yet, is the international system, is it built to deal with democratic processes inside countries when it comes to things like getting into wars and enforcing treaties and that kind of thing? I think there’s some tension there in our complicated two-part constitutional system that might make it easier to just have one person making those decisions. But that is not as democratic, not as legitimate, not the way it used to work, and maybe not the best way for it to work. And I feel like that’s a conversation that’s a really interesting one, and I think we should have that conversation more often.
Matt Grossmann: So the usual first thing people say in response against the idea of more presidential war powers is that only Congress has the power to declare war. How has the evolution of that understanding, that side of it, changed over time? And what did people think, I guess, was a war, or what did people think, in the beginning, would constitute a need for congressional authorization?
Casey Dominguez: Well, I think we actually have an answer to that question because the Quasi War was not a declared war, but it was a congressionally authorized, congressionally regulated, war. Congress said at one point in law that President Adams could fight the French only near the American coast. And then they said, “No, you can fight the French, but only boats going to the Caribbean, but not from the Caribbean.” And so Congress really micromanaged the scope of that non-war conflict, which means that the entire founding generation, Federalist, Democratic, Republicans, understood that Congress had the authority to define whether hostilities were going to take place, and the scope of those hostilities. And not only that, but the Supreme Court, under John Marshall, enforced those orders, enforced those boundaries on President Adams. They told him, no, you can’t change anything Congress has said. If Congress told you you could only pursue ships in this particular way, that’s all you can do. So I don’t really think there’s a lot of disagreement about how the founding generation in both parties understood the limits of presidential war powers. It’s us that has changed in the 20th and 21st centuries to think that the Constitution doesn’t say that anymore.
Matt Grossmann: So the current context is that President Trump recently authorized military strikes against Iran, which I think everyone recognized had the potential to get us into war, although have so far provoked a fairly limited responses. And we’re now to the point where I think they were asked about their, what was the authorization for this. And they just said, here’s the list of five or six things that might be authorization. And some of them were constitutional, some of them were post-9/11 authorizations, all kinds of things that they mixed up. And so I guess we’re to the point where no one is enforcing this or attempting to say that they’re not going to find some way to justify what they were doing.
But what do you think are the most useful historical parallels to this kind of a debate? Not just in I guess how much it is authorized, but in this idea that there’s always going to be people saying what we’re doing is authorizing something that’s limited or that is required secrecy or that was not something that wasn’t war but obviously could have gotten us into it.
Casey Dominguez: I mean, there’s a lot of precedent for the kind of thing that Trump did. So I’ll just start by answering the question, is it an act of war? Yeah. Bombing another country with giant bombs and destroying a program that’s important to their national security, that is an act of war.
Does the president have the authority to initiate hostilities? No. Does the president have the, is there any legal basis or is there any law? There’s not. And in fact, Congress made that clear. In 2020, when Trump ordered the assassination of Soleimani, Congress passed a law on a bipartisan basis, Democrats were in control of Congress, but on a bipartisan basis, they passed a law in both houses that said that there was no legal authority for President Trump to initiate hostilities and that any sustained hostilities, that he couldn’t take any other actions against Iran without congressional authority. And he vetoed it, and Congress didn’t override the veto, which is where we are.
Instead of the President cannot take actions unless any kind of hostilities, period. He just can’t. That’s not where we are. Where we are is Congress has to veto presidential hostilities, and also Congress has to tell him to stop and the President can veto that. And so really two-thirds of Congress has to make decisions about hostilities that a majority of Congress is supposed to be able to make.
Presidents have bombed other countries. President Clinton bombed Iraq on multiple occasions. What presidents in the late 20th century tended to do in those situations was say, well, the United Nations authorized me to do this. I’m enforcing a United Nations resolution. That’s not constitutional. That’s not constitutionally legitimate, but Congress and the American people and the media all shrugged their shoulders at that as a justification and I guess accepted it as a justification even though it isn’t one, and that appears to be happening again.
And so the political system as a whole doesn’t appear to be interested in how we used to do things or what the Constitution used to mean about the scope of presidential war powers, and I think that that’s personally not great.
Matt Grossmann: So the other current context is many people would say we were basically already in the war. We were the primary military provider for Israel. We were directly shooting down missiles that were fired at Israel. We’re also obviously currently involved, to a large extent, in Ukraine as well. How have we traditionally thought of this idea of we’re not in the war, but we’re a partner to those that are. Has that been something that has required Congressional authorization? Is that a loophole that’s expanded over time?
Casey Dominguez: Well, I mean, I will throw in the, this is definitely not how the founding generation thought about things and that George Washington opposed permanent entanglements. One of the earliest debates was about whether Washington himself could unilaterally declare neutrality in the war between Britain and France. And Madison insisted that even declaring neutrality was too far beyond the president’s power. And the political system at the time eventually agreed and said Congress can declare neutrality and the President can’t do it. So we’re very, very, very far from that.
But a more recent precedent is the, or analogy might be Nixon’s bombing of Cambodia. I mean, Congress had authorized the conflict in Vietnam through the Gulf of Tonkin resolution, but had not authorized the bombing of countries that were adjacent.
So if you’re thinking about, so okay, Congress has authorized the United States to support Israel by supplying it with weapons and money and other things, that doesn’t extend to Iran. And Congress and I think, in the Biden administration at least, we’re pretty careful about saying, yes, we are supporting Ukraine, but we’re definitely not at war with Russia, and we want to avoid anything that would suggest otherwise.
And to go back to the Vietnam example, the fact that Nixon bombed Cambodia was a big deal. Democrats were in control of the Congress and Nixon was a Republican, so partisanship helped that be a big deal, but that was one of the things that led to the writing of the War Powers Resolution. That Congress was very upset that Nixon had extended a war that Congress had at least tangentially authorized to some other conflict. And of course in the Vietnam War, it was always framed as we were supporting the Vietnamese in the way that we support Israel.
Matt Grossmann: So there were some immediate calls for impeachment around the Iranian strikes. I wonder how frequently that is viewed as the response, and if this is just a symptom of a broader issue, which is that there just isn’t much of a way to actually constrain the President even when they are doing things that are constitutional other than an impeachment power that maybe isn’t as strong as some want it to be.
Casey Dominguez: Well, I mean, there have been periods where Congress has taken back foreign policy power, the reigning in of, or the Neutrality Acts in the 1930s to try to keep the United States from getting into international entanglements that could lead to war. The Intelligence Acts in the, gosh, I’m missing a year in my brain at the moment, but to keep the president from being able to take covert actions through the CIA or other agencies that Congress wasn’t informed about. The War Powers Resolution to try to not very effectively claw back authority from the President to start conflicts.
Congress has tried, but as you say, none of that has really stymied the growth of presidential war power, and I think impeachment has just proven to be a mostly ineffective tool. The bar is too high, two-thirds is too many votes and there’s a game theory checkmate, right? If you want to win at impeachment, you just make sure that your party will support you. And if your party supports you well, then you can do whatever and you can’t be impeached, and Bill Clinton and Donald Trump several times showed that to be the case.
And impeachment could have been used a lot of times and it hasn’t been used. What if the Whigs had had enough votes to impeach Polk for making up the circumstances and lying about the origins of the Mexican War? How might have the constitutional system evolved differently? How much more reticent might presidents be if that was a precedent on the books? But Congress has never had to try to constrain presidents in part because they used to constrain themselves, or everyone’s political understanding of what the rules were didn’t allow Presidents to step beyond a certain boundary. And as those understandings have changed, now Congress has to enforce limits on the President, and our system is not very good for that.
Matt Grossmann: So as you mentioned, Trump’s actions are quite similar to some other actions previous, of recent presidents. On the other hand, several recent presidents had the plans for nearly this exact action and decided not to do it. And Trump, of course, came to power in part in the 2016 primary by arguing against the large international entanglements of the Bush administration. So to what extent is there anything unique about Trump here, and is this route between complaining about the powers of the last President to using all the powers you can as president the common route?
Casey Dominguez: Yeah, unfortunately that may be the case. If you think about Obama’s attacks on Libya or Obama/NATO/the UN’s no-fly zone in Libya during the Arab Spring was not a legal action. And Obama had come to power complaining about in part the use of force by the Bush administration. So it may just be that if those tools are there, presidents are going to use them and it doesn’t matter what they say.
But I do think that there’s some, what matters is how both the Constitution and the president’s promises and American commitments are interpreted by the public and the media and the Congress and the people around the president. And all of those are not about the Constitution, but they have a big effect I think on the kinds of entanglements that we find ourselves in.
Matt Grossmann: Trump is also using warlike powers and warlike statements in expanding his role in immigration and criminal justice policy. He’s talked about deporting people on the basis that they were alien enemies. He’s recently deployed troops in Los Angeles and taking control of National Guard operations. There is maybe a more unique case for Trump in how his warlike powers might advance his other policy interests. But I guess what are the historical precursors for that? Has war power been expanded to areas like this in the past? And how similar have been the debates about sovereignty surrounding the border and immigration to these debates about war powers?
Casey Dominguez: I am not an immigration scholar, I won’t be able to talk in as much detail as some other folks about the relevant precedents. But to the degree that there’s a whole bunch of laws on the books that have arisen out of previous moments of threat, you’ve got the post-9/11 security apparatus and including the creation of the Department of Homeland Security. You’ve got the Emergency Powers Act, you’ve got the court’s historical tendency to just be hands off about foreign policy and especially wartime emergencies. All of that means there are a lot of potentially legal tools that are lying around that can allow the President, without asserting unilateral executive authority, to just use legal authority that’s lying around to declare emergencies and use not really military force necessarily, because there are laws around military force, but even those, if he just follows the proper channels, he might be able to even use those military authorities to enforce immigration laws. And Congress and the courts have carved out immigration as an area where there isn’t as robust protections for civil liberties.
It’s an area where there’s a lot of presidential power sitting there and not necessarily unilateral power, but congressionally authorized power that is potentially very dangerous for civil liberties. And I think everybody’s alert to those possibilities.
And the nationalist arguments are certainly part of how he has risen to power and defining who’s an American and what it means to protect America is a rhetoric that’s always been really powerful, even going back to the beginning of the 19th century saying, “Rah, rah USA, we’re defending us against the bad guys.” Or even back to the 19th century, “Defending us against the bad guys and their Cherokees,” or, “Defending us against the bad guys and their Iraqis,” or whatever. That’s a powerful argument, but it’s a political argument. And whether those tools are used legitimately, there will have to be a political solution to that, not just a legal solution. Congress, of course, can try to change the laws under which the President is asserting authority, but that would take perhaps a different party being in charge because one thing that our constitutional system suffers from is that the President’s party has never liked to restrain him.
Matt Grossmann: Of course there are signs of Democratic backsliding in the United States and many concerns about moves toward authoritarianism. How much should we see precedent in these current debates in the kinds of things that you studied? How worried was Congress that giving the President war powers would move us closer to having a king? Did they think about this as obviously wouldn’t have used the same terminology we’re using now, but this current debate about moves toward authoritarian rule?
Casey Dominguez: Yeah, absolutely. I think it being self-evident that monarchs are bad has always been part of the rhetoric around congressional war powers, at least as I’ve read it in their debates about the Commander-in-Chief Clause. You never want to be on the side that’s arguing for monarchical power. But if anyone ever does, if anyone is in that making those arguments, it’s always someone in the President’s party. The nationalist, rally around the flag, rally around the President, at least since the beginning of the 20th century that has enabled a growth of presidential power that is potentially a source of democratic backsliding. And of course, the United States government today with the technology for surveillance that is available and the military firepower that is possessed by the government of the United States, it would be very, very bad if those things are turned on the people of the United States. And we’ve got just the words in the Constitution and how we all interpret those words to protect us from that.
Matt Grossmann: That’s not such a positive case given that you’ve just told us that we generally understand that we’re not interpreting the words as written and that there isn’t much of an enforcement mechanism for those words, and that it’s evolved to a situation where it’s not really about is there authority or legitimacy. It’s about can we get essentially supermajorities to push back on the expansion of presidential power, is that all bad news, or is there any silver lining to this history?
Casey Dominguez: I find that to be all pretty scary news, I’m not going to lie, but history isn’t written yet. And the rhetoric around being a national representative and who best represents the people and what the Constitution says and what we all understand it to say that is rhetoric that all of those are political tools that can be used to oppose authoritarian overreach.
I’m going to add one more worry here. One thing that I’ve been watching is my experience with understanding what war powers used to mean and what they mean now makes me concerned about Congress’s spending power because it’s self-evident to everybody that the Appropriations Clause means that Congress gets to decide how money is spent. And yet the Trump administration has decided, “Oh yeah, we are just going to spend money however we want. And oh yeah, Congress authorized USAID, come spend it yourself, Congress.” And I think if Congress doesn’t have the war power and it doesn’t have the spending power, then it’s nothing. And I worry about the spending power and the power grab that has been taking place over appropriations in that it could follow the same trajectory as war powers.
Matt Grossmann: You definitely didn’t take my invitation to offer good news to end with. What about your personal trajectory? Anything you’re working on now that you wanted to tout or that you’ll be looking for going forward?
Casey Dominguez: I’m excited to finish my term as department chair and then to pick up with some of these threads that have been left by the book. Maybe take a look at the rhetoric around the Commander in Chief powers in the 1950s during that period of big transition. And I’m also teaching a new class on informed citizenship that’s a combination of very low level research methods but also information literacy, quantitative reasoning, quantitative literacy. And I’m excited to think about the ways that political scientists can participate in helping the citizenry deal with the new information environment.
Matt Grossmann: There’s a lot more to learn. The Science of Politics is available bi-weekly from the Niskanen Center, and I’m your host, Matt Grossmann. If you like this discussion, here are the episodes you should check out next, all linked on our website. The Backstory for Presidential Power Grabs. Will Trump Have Unilateral Power Or Just Pretend He Does? Why Foreign Policy is Still Bipartisan? How Debt Finance Leads to War and Defense Spending? And Putin’s War and Populist Authoritarianism. Thanks to Casey Dominguez for joining me. Please check out Commander in Chief and then listen in next time.