Analysis: Over time, Congress has ceded its constitutional authority to the president. It’s only gotten worse since Trump took office.
The memos mean that the only way to hold a president accountable while in office is through impeachment. And this is where Congress has managed over the past two decades to effectively disarm its most powerful weapon of presidential oversight.
There was an alternative path that House Democrats could have pursued that would have asserted their rightful powers. They should have moved to compel Trump’s compliance with their information requests by using the third branch of government: the judiciary. By sleeping on Congress’ legal right to information bearing on impeachment, House Democrats failed to enforce the impeachment prerogative in the Constitution itself.
But while history has tolerated presidents’ initiation of military conflicts without formal declarations of war by the legislative branch, Congress is not out of the war-making picture. It is significant that the Constitution gives Congress the power to appropriate money to the military, as there was no standing army or navy at the time the Constitution was ratified.
, which have contributed to approximately 500,000 civilian and military deaths. The U.S. military has been fighting al Qaeda in Afghanistan without interruption for 18 years and while its counterterrorism activities have expanded to 39 percent of the world’s nations.
But Trump went around Congress, declared a national emergency, and then diverted funds appropriated for other purposes to build his border wall. The Trump administration engaged in some legal gymnastics to justify this switch, but that’s beside the point. A majority of both chambers voted in favor of a resolution to end the emergency. But by a 36-53 vote, the Senate failed to override Trump’s veto.
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