Only those with a very superficial attachment to Israel can really be happy that she continues to rely on over $2 billion in American aid every year. In the absence of such grants, Israel would at last be under pressure to adopt a freer economy, thereby bringing about greater prosperity for her people and making it easier for her to be self-reliant. Foreign aid only inhibits salutary reforms like this, reforms that any true friend of Israel is eager to see. As a matter of fact, the Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies in Jerusalem argues that “foreign aid is the greatest obstacle to economic freedom in Israel.” It is an open secret that Israel’s military industry is inefficient and top-heavy with bureaucracy, shortcomings that consistent American aid obviously encourages. Why make difficult adjustments when billions in aid can be counted on regardless of what you do?
Our government has also done Israel a disservice by effectively infringing on her sovereignty. Israel seeks American approval for military action she deems necessary, she consults with America on matters pertaining to her own borders, and she even seeks American approval for peace talks with her neighbors—approval that is not always forthcoming. This needs to stop. And with an arsenal of hundreds of nuclear weapons, Israel is more than capable of deterring or repelling any enemy. She should once again be in charge of her own destiny.
In the face of the human cost of war—the thousands of American servicemen killed, the tens of thousands wounded, the civilian deaths—a reckoning of its material costs may seem almost obtuse. But we are not speaking of a few billion dollars here and there. The costs of our foreign policy have become so great that they risk bringing the country to bankruptcy.
When I say “bankruptcy,” I do not mean that the federal government will stop writing checks and spending money. The federal government is not likely to go out of business anytime soon. I mean that the checks and the money won’t buy anything, because the dollar will have been destroyed.
Few Americans realize just how costly our foreign policy is. Larry Lindsey, senior economic adviser to the Bush administration, embarrassed the White House when he warned in the
Wall Street Journal
that the Iraq war could cost $100 to $200 billion. Outrageous, officials said. The course of events has made Lindsey’s estimate into the epitome of optimism. In early 2006, Harvard’s Linda Bilmes and Columbia’s Joseph Stiglitz estimated the long-term costs of the war, including care for our maimed soldiers, at $2 trillion. By the end of the year they were saying that the $2 trillion figure was too low.
It isn’t just the Iraq war that busts the budget—it’s our overseas military presence as a whole. We have reached a point at which it now costs $1 trillion per year to maintain. One trillion dollars. The proposed Pentagon budget alone was $623 billion for 2008. “What’s remarkable about this year’s military budget,” wrote one military analyst, “is that it’s the largest budget since World War II, but, of course, we’re not fighting World War II.”
And just as in domestic spending, where higher budgets rarely translate into better performance, I am doubtful that much of this expenditure is actually contributing to our security. America would be much stronger and more secure if our government observed a noninterventionist foreign policy and put an end to its international overstretch. And that isn’t just because foreign meddling makes us more enemies, though that commonsensical point is certainly correct. Beyond even that, we waste a staggering amount of manpower, hardware, and wealth on a bloated overseas presence that would be better devoted to protecting the United States itself. Our forces are stretched much too thin, what with our 700 bases around the world and all the nation-building work that conservatives not so long ago criticized Bill Clinton for imposing on our military.
We have had troops in Korea for over five and a half decades. We have had troops in Europe and Japan for about as long. How many years is enough? An American presence in these places was supposed to be temporary, persisting only during the military emergencies that were cited as justification for bringing them there. Milton Friedman was right: there is nothing so permanent as a “temporary” government program.
With a $9 trillion debt, perhaps $50 trillion in entitlement liabilities, and the dollar in free fall, how much longer can we afford this unnecessary and counterproductive extravagance?
While our government engages in deficit spending to fund its military exploits overseas, detracting from our own productivity, countries like China are filling the void by expanding their trade opportunities. I have never understood this talk of our military presence as a “strategic reserve of Western civilization.” Instead, the best indication of our civilization has been our prestige in international trade. We should let the best measure of our American greatness come from free and peaceful trade with other nations, not from displays of our military might.
Now it would be a great step forward if we could even debate the foreign policy we have now, a policy that (with a few minor differences) is shared by the establishment of both major parties. One writer correctly labels it “the debate we never have.” Although many Americans oppose the continued expansion of Big Government abroad, nonintervention is never presented to them as an option. The so-called debates between pundits they see on television or read in the newspaper carefully limit the range of debate to the point of insignificance. The debate is always framed in terms of which kind of interventionist strategy our government should pursue. The possibility that we should avoid bleeding ourselves dry in endless foreign meddling is not raised. For heaven’s sake, what kind of debate is it in which all sides agree that America needs troops in 130 countries?
That may have been the kind of debate that the old
Pravda
once allowed, but where is the robust exchange of ideas that we should expect in a free society?
If we ever have such a debate, some Americans may conclude that the increased risk of terrorism is a price they are willing to pay in order to continue our government’s interventionist foreign policy. Others will realize that foreign interventionism is bankrupting us and making us less secure. However it came out, at least we would have had the debate. At the end of such a debate, Michael Scheuer concludes, Americans “may decide that the foreign policy status quo that exists at the moment is what they want. But if they do, they will at least go into it with their eyes open, and know that they are in for an extended period of war, a tremendously bloody and costly war.”
Meanwhile, our lack of debate has had terrible consequences for our republic. James Bamford observes that the leadership of al Qaeda hoped to lure us into a “desert Vietnam,” an enormously expensive war that would deplete our resources and help their own recruitment by stirring up the locals against us. And that is just what happened. The war’s ultimate cost is being estimated in the trillions. The dollar is collapsing. And more terrorists are being created. According to a study by the Global Research in International Affairs Center in Herzliya, Israel, the vast bulk of the foreign fighters in Iraq are people who had never been involved in terrorist activity before but have been radicalized by the U.S. presence in Iraq—the second holiest place in Islam.
The terrorists, in short, have played us like a fiddle. With the unnecessary and unprovoked attack on Iraq, our government gave them just what they wanted.
Americans have the right to defend themselves against attack; that is not at issue. But that is very different from launching a preemptive war against a country that had not attacked us and could not attack us, that lacked a navy and an air force, and whose military budget was a fraction of a percent of our own. A policy of overthrowing or destabilizing every regime our government dislikes is no strategy at all, unless our goal is international chaos and domestic impoverishment.
It is time for us to consider a strategic reassessment of our policy of foreign interventionism, occupation, and nation building. It is in our national interest to do so and in the interest of world peace. This is a message that resonates not only with the American people at large but also with U.S. military personnel: in the second quarter of 2007 our campaign raised more money from active duty and retired military than did any other Republican candidate, and in the third quarter we raised more than any candidate in either party. Then in the fourth quarter we received more money in military donations than all other Republicans put together. This message is popular, and it is based on American security, fiscal sanity, and common sense.
The Constitution
T
hough written constitutions “may be violated in moments of passion or delusion,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in 1802, “yet they furnish a text to which those who are watchful may again rally and recall the people.”
Whether we are yet emerging from our own moment of disorientation after 9/11 is difficult to say. I believe, though, that enough Americans are taking a sober second look at what we have allowed our country to become, especially since that terrible day, that the Constitution may yet reemerge as a document to which the people may be rallied and recalled.
In early American history the Constitution figured heavily in political debate. People wanted to know, and politicians needed to justify, where the various schemes they debated in Congress were authorized in the Constitution. In the twenty-first century, by contrast, the Constitution is like the elephant at the tea party that everyone pretends not to notice.
The power of the executive branch, for instance, has expanded far beyond what the Framers of the Constitution envisioned. One mechanism that has strengthened it is the executive order, an instrument by which presidents have exerted powers that our Constitution never intended them to have. An executive order is a command issued by the president that enjoys his authority alone, not having been passed by Congress. Executive orders can have legitimate functions. Presidents can carry out their constitutional duties or direct their subordinates by executive order, for instance. But they can also be a source of temptation for ambitious presidents (am I being redundant?), since they can always try to get away with using them as a substitute for formal legislation that they know they cannot get to pass. He can thereby circumvent the normal, constitutional legislative process.
Executive orders were rare in the nineteenth century; for a president to issue even several dozen was unusual. The first twentieth-century president to serve a full term, Theodore Roosevelt (who served two, in fact), issued over a thousand. His distant cousin Franklin Roosevelt issued over three thousand. Executive orders continue to serve as a potent weapon in the president’s arsenal.
Congress has sometimes been complicit in presidential abuses of executive orders, either by giving express sanction to the president’s action after the fact or ignoring the abuse of power altogether. This latter course is sometimes pursued when congressmen happen to favor the president’s course of action but do not want to have to associate themselves with it (perhaps because it is controversial or politically sensitive). With executive orders, presidents can commit our troops to undeclared wars, destroy industries, or make unprecedented social-policy changes. And they remain unaccountable because often these actions occur behind the door of the Oval Office, are distributed without notice, and then executed in stealth. This is a travesty against our constitutional system, and any president worthy of the office would absolutely forswear the use of executive orders except when he can show express constitutional or statutory authority for his action.
Yet another abuse, though, and all the more troubling for being unknown to most Americans, involves the use of something called presidential signing statements. When the president signs a bill into law, he sometimes accompanies the signing with a statement, not necessarily read aloud at the signing ceremony but inserted into the record all the same. This practice was not unheard of in previous administrations, though it was nearly always employed for ceremonial purposes: to thank supporters, to point out the significance of the legislation, and in pursuit of rhetorical ends of a similar kind.
The Bush administration, on the other hand, has very often used the signing statement as a vehicle either for expressing the manner in which the president intends to interpret certain provisions of a law (his interpretation being frequently at odds with the one Congress obviously intended), or even for making clear his intention of not enforcing the provision in question at all. It is not always easy to determine whether the president has followed through on these threats, since they are so often made in areas that the White House shrouds in secrecy: foreign policy and privacy violations. In 2005, though, the Government Accountability Office gave us a very rough estimate of how many of these threatened refusals to enforce legislative provisions were followed up on: in about one-third of the nineteen cases it examined, the provision was not being enforced. Law professor Jonathan Turley was blunt: “By using signing statements to this extent, the president becomes a government unto himself.”
The Bush administration has challenged more legislative provisions in this way than any other presidential administration in American history. If Bill Clinton had done this, we would still be hearing about it. Today, few Republicans in public life have been courageous or principled enough to speak out against a clear abuse of power. (Among them are Bruce Fein, associate deputy attorney general under Ronald Reagan, and former Congressman Bob Barr.)
Again, an American president must pledge never to use the signing statement as an alternative, unconstitutional form of legislative power, and Congress and the American people should hold him to it.
Much of the recent revival of interest in the Constitution centers around the Bill of Rights and the war on terror, a subject I discuss elsewhere in this book. I could not be more sympathetic to these concerns. However, Americans must remember that the Constitution was designed not merely to prevent the federal government from violating the rights that later appeared in the Bill of Rights. It was also intended to limit the federal government’s overall scope. Article I, Section 8, lists the powers of Congress. Common law held such lists of powers to be exhaustive.
According to the Tenth Amendment to the Constitution, all powers not delegated to the federal government by the states (in Article I, Section 8) and not prohibited to the states in the Constitution (in Article I, Section 10) are reserved to the states or to the people. Thomas Jefferson held that this principle formed the very foundation of our Constitution. It was a guarantee that the experience Americans endured under the British would not be repeated, and that political decisions would be made by their own local legislatures rather than by a distant central government that would be much more difficult, if not impossible, for them to control.
Jefferson’s approach to the Constitution—which he adamantly believed could be understood by the average person and was not some secret teaching that had to be divined by immortals in black robes—was refreshingly simple. If a proposed federal law was not listed among the powers granted to Congress in Article I, Section 8, then no matter how otherwise attractive it seemed, it had to be rejected on constitutional grounds. If it were especially wise or desirable, there would be no difficulty in amending the Constitution to allow for it. And according to Jefferson we should always bear in mind, to the extent possible, the original intention of those who drafted and ratified the Constitution: “On every question of construction, carry ourselves back to the time when the Constitution was adopted, recollect the spirit manifested in the debates, and instead of trying what meaning may be squeezed out of the text, or invented against it, conform to the probable one in which it was passed.”
“Our peculiar security is in possession of a written Constitution,” Jefferson advised us. “Let us not make it a blank paper by construction.” Jefferson was afraid, in other words, that we would allow our government to interpret the Constitution so broadly that we may as well be governed by a blank piece of paper. The limitations the Constitution placed on the federal government had to be taken seriously if we expected to maintain a free society. There would always be a powerful temptation to allow the federal government to do something many people wanted, but that the Constitution did not authorize. Since the amendment process is time-consuming, there would be a further temptation: just exercise the unauthorized power without amending the Constitution. But then what is the point of having a Constitution at all?
It is true that although Jefferson was a great constitutional exegete, he was not himself present at the Constitutional Convention. But Jefferson’s ideas were not his alone: they reflected many of the sentiments expressed at his state’s ratifying convention by such important and diverse figures as Edmund Randolph, George Nicholas, and Patrick Henry—not to mention John Taylor of Caroline, perhaps the most prolific political pamphleteer of the 1790s. Jefferson was merely giving voice to this much larger tradition when he expounded his strict-constructionist views.
“Confidence is everywhere the parent of despotism,” said Jefferson in 1798. “Free government is founded in jealousy, and not in confidence. . . . In matters of Power, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Nearly a quarter of a century later, Jefferson could still be heard uttering the same warning: “Is confidence or discretion, or is STRICT LIMIT, the principle of our Constitution?”
I sometimes hear the objection that certain phrases in the Constitution give the federal government more power than what is listed in Article I, Section 8. The “general welfare” clause is often cited, although equally dishonest interpretations of the interstate commerce and “necessary and proper” clauses have also been put forward. I have already noted that common law held lists of powers such as the one in Article I, Section 8, to be exhaustive, a point that refutes the idea that qualifying phrases like “general welfare” could give an open-ended character to the powers themselves. But the testimony of the Framers is also very clear. James Madison wrote, “If Congress can do whatever in their discretion can be done by money, and will promote the General Welfare, the Government is no longer a limited one, possessing enumerated powers, but an indefinite one, subject to particular exceptions.” Toward the end of his life, he added: “With respect to the words general welfare, I have always regarded them as qualified by the detail of powers connected with them. To take them in a literal and unlimited sense would be a metamorphosis of the Constitution into a character which there is a host of proofs was not contemplated by its creators.” And of course, as Madison elsewhere wrote, if the federal government really had been intended to carry out whatever action might promote the general welfare, what was the point of listing its specific powers in Article I, Section 8, since this superpower would have covered all of those anyway?
The typical reply to this argument, if one is forthcoming at all, is that Alexander Hamilton had a different view of the “general welfare” clause. Indeed he did, but what does that prove? Hamilton was dramatically out of step with most of the other delegates to the Constitutional Convention. He was also inconsistent in his views, saying one thing before the Constitution was ratified and another after ratification. In his 1791 Report on Manufactures, he denied that the spending authority of Congress was confined to the powers enumerated in Article I, Section 8, laying out a broad array of areas he wanted to see receive government funding—precisely the areas he denied the national government would have jurisdiction over when he wrote Federalist No. 17 and Federalist No. 34 several years earlier.
Patrick Henry raised precisely this concern as the ratification of the Constitution was being debated in Virginia: wasn’t “general welfare” a dangerously open-ended phrase that would permit the federal government to do whatever it wanted, since government officials could blandly claim that all its measures were intended to promote the general welfare? Supporters of the Constitution gave Henry a definitive answer: no, “general welfare” did not and could not have such a broad meaning.
Now, isn’t our Constitution a “living” document that evolves in accordance with experience and changing times, as we’re so often told? No—a thousand times no. If we feel the need to change our Constitution, we are free to amend it. In 1817, James Madison reminded Congress that the Framers had “marked out in the [Constitution] itself a safe and practicable mode of improving it as experience might suggest”—a reference to the amendment process. But that is not what advocates of a so-called living Constitution have in mind. They favor a system in which the federal government, and in particular the federal courts, are at liberty—even in the absence of any amendment—to interpret the Constitution altogether differently from how it was understood by those who drafted it and those who voted to ratify it.
Leave aside the alleged problem of determining exactly what the Framers intended by this or that constitutional clause—supporters of the living Constitution must be able to figure out the original intent well enough if they are so sure we need to evolve away from it. If the people agreed to a particular understanding of the Constitution, and over the course of the intervening years they have performed no official act (such as amending the Constitution in accordance with their evolved ideas) reversing that original understanding, by what right may government unilaterally change the terms of its contract with the people, interpreting its words to mean something very different from what the American people had all along been told they meant?
A “living” Constitution is just the thing any government would be delighted to have, for whenever the people complain that their Constitution has been violated, the government can trot out its judges to inform the people that they’ve simply misunderstood: the Constitution, you see, has merely evolved with the times. Thus, as in Orwell’s
Animal Farm
, “no animal shall sleep in a bed” becomes “no animal shall sleep in a bed with sheets,” “no animal shall drink alcohol” becomes “no animal shall drink alcohol to excess,” and “no animal shall kill any other animal” becomes “no animal shall kill any other animal without cause.”
That’s why on this issue I agree with historian Kevin Gutzman, who says that those who would give us a “living” Constitution are actually giving us a dead Constitution, since such a thing is completely unable to protect us against the encroachments of government power.