Why the Democrats can't stop the surge

As a young House candidate in 1972, I learned just how little Congress can do to pull the plug on a war started by a president.

By Walter Shapiro

Read more: Congress, Vietnam War, Walter Shapiro, Opinion, Iraq War

Reuters and AP photos

Left: U.S. troops take their positions after a suicide car bomb attack in Mosul, Iraq, July 30, 2006 (Reuters/Khaled al-Mousily). Right: Infantrymen sprint across a clearing where a U.S. battalion is trapped under weapons fire 50 miles northeast of Saigon, Vietnam, June 18, 1967 (AP Photo/Henri Huet).

Jan. 18, 2007 | WASHINGTON -- With the Vietnam War raging in 1972, I ran for Congress as a militantly antiwar candidate. My signature issue -- and it was almost enough to propel me to victory in a Democratic primary -- was a flamboyant promise to "filibuster war appropriations." This was a passionate, although preposterous, pledge, since I knew at the time that House rules strictly barred delaying tactics like the filibuster. But as a 25-year-old graduate student, I was confident that my antiwar wiles could outwit age-old congressional procedures, if only the voters of Michigan possessed the wisdom to send me to Washington.

My memories of the home-front battles during the Vietnam War have shaped, in large measure, my skeptical reaction to the rising crescendo of congressional voices vowing legislative action to curtail George W. Bush's war plans in Iraq and to set a timetable for American withdrawal. The late 1960s and early 1970s demonstrated the ineptness of Congress at condemning a war it once condoned. So many legislative vehicles, so much anguished debate and so little to show for it before 1973, five years into the Nixon administration and nine years after Lyndon Johnson first escalated the war in 1964. Even when Richard Nixon announced the withdrawal of U.S. ground troops from Vietnam on March 23, 1973, he was not so much humbled by Congress as buoyed by the Paris peace agreement with Hanoi. "We have prevented the imposition of a Communist government by force on South Vietnam," he declared.

This scornful view of Congress during the Vietnam War is not only my retrospective verdict but also that of scholars who have examined the legislative record. Liberal legal theorist John Hart Ely etched a scathing portrait of a toothless Congress in his 1993 book, "War and Responsibility: Constitutional Lessons of Vietnam and Its Aftermath." Ely persuasively argued, "Throughout the Indochina War ...a majority in Congress showed itself to be consistently unwilling to end the fighting ... but at the same time quite resourceful in scattering the landscape with rationalizations whereby it could continue to claim that it wasn't really its war."

There are many who would vigorously argue that political realities are different today. President Bush was repudiated by the recent congressional elections, even though Democratic majorities in Congress are razor thin. Bush's low job-approval ratings (about 35 percent) are at levels that Nixon reached only as he was swept up in the whirlpool of Watergate. The pace of political change is also much faster in the 21st century, thanks to cable television (everything from Fox News to Jon Stewart), blogs, YouTube and a larger media culture that caters to truncated attention spans.

But the continuities of the American political system are also strong, especially its bias toward the executive branch in wartime. The Constitution has not changed in the past three decades, nor has the difficulty of getting 535 members of Congress to speak with a unified voice on anything. The dizzying variety of plans floated on Capitol Hill in the past week to "do something" about Iraq -- from "nonbinding" resolutions to long-shot challenges to war funding -- underscore the problem. Once again we have a stubborn and isolated president in his White House bunker. Once again, we have legislators who see the war through the lens of a reelection campaign, and that inevitably brings with it both timidity and a preference for easy rhetoric over difficult results.

The biggest problem that Congress has in stopping a war is -- bluntly -- its own complicity in starting it. That remains as true now as it was in the years after the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which authorized Lyndon Johnson to expand the Vietnam War. Some of the angriest senators (John Kerry, Chris Dodd, Chuck Hagel and George Voinovich) hectoring Condi Rice before the Foreign Relations Committee last week voted for the 2002 legislation granting Bush the power to go to war. A healthy majority of the current members of Congress have consistently voted for war appropriations in the past without imposing any conditions on the president. All those votes have set legal precedents that are difficult to untangle, which is why a congressional measure to modify or revoke its 2002 blank-check approval for the invasion of Iraq would not end the war.

The denizens of Capitol Hill have been down this road before. In 1971, in a typical legislative shell game, Congress voted overwhelmingly to rescind the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. Despite pious antiwar speeches, nothing changed. The reason was, as Ely explains, "Congress had ... by a number of appropriations measures, quite pointedly reiterated its authorization of the war." John Lehman, who was then working for Henry Kissinger in the Nixon White House, gleefully points out in his 1992 book, "Making War," that the repeal was orchestrated by Republicans. Their reason? According to Lehman, they wanted to demonstrate that Nixon's legal authority for the war was based "on the president's power as commander in chief and the annual authorizations and appropriations Congress passed for the war."

Another obstacle Congress faces is the ultimate constitutional weapon -- the presidential veto. The most ambitious congressional initiative to end the Vietnam War was the McGovern-Hatfield amendment, rejected by the Senate in 1970 and 1971, which would have set a timetable for the withdrawal of American forces from Indochina. But had it passed Congress (and that is a big if, since the amendment never received more than 42 votes in the Senate), it would have been subject to Nixon's veto.

The same would be true of any effort to mandate a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq today. As long as Bush retains the support of most Republicans in Congress, he can make a veto stick, since all he needs are 146 votes in the House or 34 in the Senate to prevail. It is infinitely easier for nervous Republicans to make a few critical comments about the war before TV cameras on Capitol Hill than to actually vote to restrict the war-making powers of the president. And remember: Most House Republicans hold safe one-party seats and would be in little political jeopardy even with a Democratic tidal wave in 2008.

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