The Commitments Resolution

How much power should a President have to commit the U.S. overseas? The answer is less than clear. Most Presidents, afraid that too many restrictions would tie their hands in relations with foreign governments, interpret their mandate as broadly as possible. As a result of the nation's experience in Viet Nam, however, there is a move in Congress to narrow the presidential reach. Indeed, Idaho's Senator Frank Church has gone so far as to warn that U.S. presidential power is leading toward "Cae-sarism." "The Roman Caesars," he told his colleagues recently, "did not spring full blown from the brow of Zeus. Subtly and insidiously, they stole their powers away from an unsuspecting Senate."

Though they may not have subscribed to Church's hyperbolic analogy, the U.S. Senators approved his point. Last week the Senate passed, by a vote of 70 to 16, a resolution that advises Presidents to ask the consent of Congress before they ever again commit the U.S. overseas. The measure does not have the force of law, but merely expresses the "sense of the Senate." It nevertheless will stand as a clear warning that the Congress will not meekly accept unilateral presidential initiatives in foreign affairs.

Convert's Zeal. Proud of its constitutional mandate to advise the President on treaties, the Senate has long brooded over what it feels to be an arrogation of its influence in foreign affairs. Conservatives in the mid-'50s nearly succeeded in initiating a constitutional restriction, the Bricker Amendment, that would have stopped the President from signing executive agreements with other countries. When that attempt failed, emotions cooled for a while, only to be fired once again by Viet Nam and what many felt was Johnsonian duplicity in leading the U.S. into war.

There was, to be sure, an element of the convert's zeal on the part of the proponents of last week's resolution, several of whom have admitted that they were negligent in not objecting much earlier to Viet Nam policy. Its chief sponsor, in fact, was J. William Fulbright, who five years ago also sponsored the Gulf of Tonkin resolution --the measure that the Johnson Administration later claimed was the "functional equivalent" of a declaration of war. In part at least, last week's National Commitments resolution is the doves' belated atonement for the Tonkin measure, which received scarcely a critical glance when it passed Congress in 1964. For all the hope supporters had for it, the new resolution would not in itself prevent some future Tonkin vote. The Tonkin resolution, ironically, was just the kind of legislative approval that the Senators demanded last week.

Like the Johnson Administration before him, President Nixon opposed the measure as an attempt to tie the Executive's hands in dealing with foreign countries. At best, the Nixon people felt, it might result in confusion in foreign chancelleries. At worst, it might hobble the execution of foreign policy and perhaps even interfere with the Paris peace negotiations. Democratic Senator Gale McGee, one of the resolution's few active opponents, said that it was "loaded with mischief-making."

So strong was the feeling in the Senate, however, that the Administration contented itself with mere announcement of opposition. A watered-down Republican substitute never aroused much enthusiasm, and liberals and conservatives alike united to assert the power and independence of the Senate against the Executive.

Rightly or wrongly, Presidents on many occasions have irrevocably committed the country to foreign ventures without congressional consent. In the first two decades of the century, for example, American troops were sent repeatedly to preserve order or protect U.S. interests in Caribbean countries. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt traded 50 World War I destroyers for British bases in the Western Hemisphere. As Winston Churchill observed, the action "would, according to all the standards of history, have justified the German government in declaring war." President Truman later dispatched troops to Korea without congressional approval, John Kennedy had his Bay of Pigs, and Lyndon Johnson saw no need to ask Congress before sending fighting men to the Dominican Republic.

Close Watch. Still, though they may not have observed protocol--or in some cases the Constitution--it is not so easy to contend that the Chief Executives were always wrong. In the summer of 1940, for instance, President Roosevelt had good reason to believe that American destroyers might prove decisive in defeating a German invasion of Britain; a British defeat would have brought the U.S. into the gravest peril. Yet Congress probably would not have approved the transaction for weeks or months, if at all. Congress is oftentimes hostage to parochial interests, while the President has the national constituency and brings full concern for the national interest.

The issue will not be settled by last week's resolution or by a dozen like it, and the debate promises to continue long after peace comes in Viet Nam. As a result of Viet Nam, many in Congress are distrustful of any President's wisdom and determined to deny him even the military means, let alone the authority, to intervene unilaterally. One thing is certain: Richard Nixon will be watched more closely by Congress than have been any of his predecessors of the past few decades.

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