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Backgrounder: Balance of War Powers: The U.S. President and Congress

Council on Foreign Relations

Author: Robert McMahon, Deputy Editor
April 17, 2007

Introduction

The U.S. Constitution gives Congress and the president different responsibilities in waging wars, but there have long been disputes about where one’s war powers begin and the other’s ends. This year’s showdown over the Iraq supplemental war-funding bill marks one of the biggest yet during an ongoing war. The House and Senate this year have passed measures calling for troops to pull out starting in 2008. President Bush has vowed to veto either one and has called on the Congress to send him a “clean” funding bill to sign. He says that by inserting timelines, Congress is trying to micromanage the conflict, which further ties the hands of the commanders in the field. The Democrat-controlled Congress, taking its mandate from the midterm elections and consistently low public approval ratings of the war, says it is acting on the wishes of the American people to end the war in Iraq.

What are the president’s war powers?

The U.S. Constitution empowers the president to wage wars as commander-in-chief while Congress has the power to declare wars and fund them. But chief executives from both major parties often differ with Congress over their ability to deploy military power. A number of experts believe presidents have demonstrated greater power to wage wars since the end of World War II. “This has been a fifty-year slide and Congress is paying the price,” says Louis Fisher, a specialist in constitutional law at the Library of Congress. “The president has been commander-in-chief since 1789, but this notion that they can go to war whenever they want, and [ignore] Congress, that’s a post-World War II attitude.”

Read the rest of this article on the cfr.org website.

Copyright 2007 by the Council on Foreign Relations. This material is republished on GlobalSecurity.org with specific permission from the cfr.org. Reprint and republication queries for this article should be directed to cfr.org.