Opinion: Which way to the front?

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The Center for American Progress’ John Podesta and Larry Korb dropped by for a meeting with the Times editorial board a few days back, and shared an interesting take on the veto brouhaha that is roiling the capital right now. Like many people who come in to see us, the two former White House staffers (Korb was an assistant secretary of defense under President Reagan and Podesta was deputy chief of staff in the Clinton Administration) were dissatisfied about an editorial stance: specifically the Times’ already fabled ‘Do we really need a Gen. Pelosi?’ That piece infuriated many on the left and was cheered by many on the right—including, as Sonni Efron has noted, the current occupant of the White House. It also, Podesta asserted, was a departure from the Times’ otherwise creditable editorial policy on the Iraq war.

I think it’s no big secret that the current editorial board composition is substantially different than it was in 2003, when we were among the few U.S. papers to editorialize strongly against invading Iraq. Sadly, those old arguments are no longer available, but you’ll be interested to know that we said the president’s argument ‘loses us and, we suspect, many other Americans,’ called the administration’s justifications for quick military action ‘confusing and unfocused,’ noted presciently that nation building ‘would probably mean U.S. occupation of Iraq for some unspecified time, at open-ended cost,’ criticized the president for ‘insist[ing] on immediate war just as the political pressure and military threat appear to be having a positive effect,’ and (ouch!) confidently pronounced, ‘It is well established that Saddam Hussein possesses weapons of mass destruction.’

Where I departed from Podesta (and like Franklin D. Roosevelt, I hate war) is that I don’t see any contradiction between these two editorial positions. It’s fair to say that the Times’ arguments against invasion did not carry the day in 2003, and the nation has been engaged in war or conflict or police action or something in Iraq ever since—all of it under color of a still-in-effect congressional ‘use-of-force’ authorization (the rough equivalent of the letter of ‘marque or reprisal’ mentioned in the Constitution). The issue now is one of separation of powers, not strategy. As noted in the Gen. Pelosi editorial, Congress (whose own composition has changed quite a bit since aught-three) has powers of the purse and the power to declare war. It now has the option of withholding funds or of withdrawing its use-of-force resolution, and it is unwilling to exercise either option, so what have we got to talk about? Moreover, Congress, for better or (in my opinion) worse, has taken a supine role in every war in the history of the United States; legislators can’t bow to the president fast enough when it comes to both declaring and managing the countless conflicts this peace-loving nation manages to get into. And this is a habit that both Korb and, to a much greater extent, Podesta were happy to accept when they worked for great presidents of yore.

To his credit, Podesta didn’t dispute any of this, and in fact expanded on his own impatience with congressional opposition to Bill Clinton’s adventures in the Balkans. His argument, which is particularly interesting in light of the ongoing vote/veto/vow-to-work-together kabuki, is that all this grandstanding has its own value, that effectively the president’s sole authority as commander in chief can be challenged short of a constitutional crisis. Korb and Podesta are hawking a set of post-veto proposals that nicely aim to move the president’s position with all sides maintaining plausible deniability. So, for example, Congress won’t hold war funding hostage, but maybe just detain it a little bit while working on concessions from the White House; the president on the other hand doesn’t concede his warmaking authority to Congress, but just sort of agrees on the need for some target dates for getting out of Iraq.

Podesta was as candid about all this as only a former government employee can be, and when I presented my own scenario—that it’s 2009 and President Clinton is now facing congressional opposition to her widely unpopular humanitarian intervention in Darfur—he acknowledged that at that time he’ll be shocked, shocked to find that Congress is trying to overstep its constitutional role in policymaking. I dig Podesta, and I appreciate the reminder that for all the seemingly sacrosanct delineations of authority in American governance, there are many ways to make a sausage or unmake a war.