1.10.07: The Ultimate Check

Congress is talking big with President Bush set to announce a "surge" of ground troops to quell sectarian unrest in Baghdad.

With the Democrats in charge of both chambers, there is talk that Congress might actually use its Constitutional perogative to cut off funding of the troop buildup in Iraq.

When the Framers created the Constitution, it intended the Congress to specialize in checks. But, all too often, Congress has used a different type of check when it comes to a president's use of the military.

England's Magna Carta became the model of all great contitutional democracies in establishing legislative authority to fund a monarch's military. Controlling the power of the purse was the most effective way to limit an executive's military power, but our Congress has rarely used it.


Congress gave President Johnson an infamous blank check with the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that funded our military operations in Vietnam. But even when public opinion screamed out against our involvement there, Congress never used its budget power to bring our troops home.

Rather, at the END of the war, it passed the War Powers Resolution to supposedly require a president to get congressional approval for the use of combat troops. The U.S. has been involved in over a dozen combat situations since the passage of this resolution, but Congress has never used the resolution and only limited funding of U.S. military involvement in Central America during the 1980s.

Now some members of Congress are threatening to use the ultimate check of presidential power by not writing any more checks to fund Bush's planned troop surge in Baghdad.

But using this power may be much more difficult than the Framers ever imagined.

The Iraq War is thought to cost about $8 billion every month and will get even costlier with the troop surge. Yet the Pentagon has never acknowledged how much our combat in Iraq has cost or will cost.

When the Pentagon requests money from the Congress, it does not ask for specific money to be directed toward military operations in Iraq. Instead, money is requested in lump sum for the more general "Global War on Terror." This includes monies for combat in Afghanistan and other military actions.

With this type of budgetary vagueness, targeting specific funds for the upcoming troop surge could be impossible. But this should not stop Congress from demanding that the Pentagon use more transparancy in its budget requests as a way of at least heightening our knowledge about the financial costs of the War in Iraq.