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Losing America: Confronting a Reckless and Arrogant Presidency by Robert C. Byrd Rating: ••• (Recommended)
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Power West Virginia Senator Robert C. Byrd preaches eloquently against the Bush Administration and reminds readers why the balance of power is so important. His book, Losing America, may appeal to those who agree or disagree with his positions. While some readers will disagree with his diatribes against the President, the points Byrd makes about why Congress has the power of the purse, and the importance of full and open debate will make sense to most readers. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning of Chapter Three, “Worms In The Wood,” pp. 56-63: “A Republic, Madam, if you can keep it” This was Benjamin Franklin’s famous response to the lady who anxiously pressed him at the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 “Dr Franklin, what have you given us?” I had been talking with the Senate pages again. Over the years I had made it a practice to spend time with these young. high school students, idealists all, who come to the Senate to learn about government and perform numerous tasks for members. By infusing these youngsters with appreciation for the historical roots of our government, perhaps I could generate a small cadre of Americans who would spread the word. The pages are always fascinated with the connections to England that are apparent in our own organic law, and I like to make the ~ history of our Republic come alive for them in an impromptu classroom just off the Senate floor from time to time As I often explain to my young friends, indeed, Franklin’s words were much much more than a clever admonishment. They were a challenge to ensuing generations, first to comprehend what they had been given, then to play their part in protecting that gift and pass on the legacy to generations yet unborn. Franklin knew firsthand the difficulty of protecting liberty. He had traveled back and forth across the Atlantic in the years before the American Revolution, attempting to mediate various disputes between the colonies and the British Parliament. Yet with each passing year, Parliament became ever more autocratic and ham-handed toward the colonists. Franklin, a loyal British subject and no early revolutionary, was convinced that grievances between the Americans and London could and ought to be peacefully addressed through petition and complaint. Only after he concluded that corruption and cynicism ruled in Parliament did he decide that the only recourse was throwing off the British yoke. It is important to realize that the American Revolution— that sudden wrenching free from domination by a uniquely powerful military force—was nearly without precedent in all of history. Certainly, a representative government_—with the people as the sovereign for a land as large and a population as dispersed as the American colonies—was untested and untried. Nobody knew if the new, radical American experiment would work. The form of government that flowed from debates in Independence Hall would be severely tested, not only at state ratifying conventions in due course but also in the long roll of centuries to come. Difficulties lay in wait: the divisiveness of faction; the sharing between Senate and president of the powers of appointments and of treaty making; the conduct of American foreign policy; the separation of powers; control of the public purse; the declaring and making of war. Looking back from the early dawn of the twenty-first century, we should have cause to marvel: how blessed we are to have inherited this pearl of great price. All the more obligatory it is upon the Congress in our day to be vigilant in protecting the people’s liberty. At bottom, it is a question of money, and clearly the Bush administration is quietly nibbling away at Congress’s power over the purse. Little by little, inch by inch, this administration bores into walls built by the framers, walls with foundations going back to antiquity. Do our people realize the importance of having the purse strings held tightly in the hands of Congress? Cicero’s astute observation is timeless: “There is no fortress so strong that money cannot take it.” If there is no check on presidential use of funds, then we have, in effect, a monarchy by another name. What force will temper the executive’s power if he also controls the purse strings? Since 1959, the year I began service on the Senate committee charged with appropriating money, I have come to appreciate not only the essential role of purse string control but also the lengths to which some presidents will go to usurp it. In January of 1959, at the onset of my first term in the Senate, I asked for assignment to the Appropriations Committee. Bobby Baker, the “can-do man” who was Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson’s special troubleshooter, had phoned prior to my swearing-in to ask what committee assignments especially appealed to me. He was in Washington. I was in West Virginia. And I quickly expressed a desire to sit on the Senate Appropriations Committee. Baker, a canny fellow doing his job, did not encourage me. Appropriations, he said, was a hard assignment for a newcomer to land. I should give him a second or third choice. I told him that I had no second or third choice, but I did list one or two other committees. Again staving off commitment, Baker rang off agreeing to acquaint majority leader Johnson with my wish. Later, when back in Washington, I was advised to seek the support of Senator Richard Russell, the southern chieftain. All southern states and all border states were represented by Democratic senators in those days. It would be useful, I also divined, to talk with Senator Carl Hayden of Arizona, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. Whatever Johnson and Hayden and Russell should agree upon would be gospel. I did as I was told and made the contacts. Lyndon Johnson subsequently invited my West Virginia colleague, Senator Jennings Randolph, and me to the majority leader’s offices just off the Senate floor. What, again, were our wishes with regard to committee assignments? Randolph wanted to be on the Labor Committee and the Public Works Committee and I repeated the words I had conveyed to Baker. Johnson was of course famously canny himself. A look in the eye was all I got; clearly he was sizing me up. And then we were dismissed. One day soon after, Johnson came to me on the floor with good news—he was putting me on the Senate Appropriations Committee. He also made me understand that he’d passed up other senators senior to me in order to do it. I recall later seeing him in a familiar pose, standing almost nose to nose while talking into the face of another senator and virtually punching his finger into the other senator’s chest. Obviously, a senator with seniority over me was learning that he wouldn’t be sitting on the Appropriations Committee. That was more than forty-five years ago, at a time of balanced power, as I look back, but not long before Congress began to lose its grip—an erosion largely accomplished by the unwillingness of Appropriations Committee members to zealously guard their power. We should have stayed as steadfast as the English. Control of the English purse over the centuries provided the leverage that the English Parliament successfully used to persuade the king to grant concessions. As I often tell my young friends the pages, whatever may be in store for our beloved America, her past is closely entwined with that of England. While the Constitution of the United States possesses much that is peculiar to our own historical experience, and it certainly is not the English Constitution, it is, in many respects, the “heir of all the ages” of English history. Steeped in this history, the framers wisely vested the power over the purse with the people’s representatives. Two principles—appropriating moneys and auditing or oversight of these moneys—were combined by the framers in Article I, Section 9 of our Constitution. “No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of the Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.” The first known instance of accounts being audited occurred in 1216, when grants contained provisions for a special audit by the great council independent of the annual audit by the exchequer. Otherwise the influence of the royal court was liable to be too strong there. Under Richard 11(1377—99), the House of Commons requested in 1378 that the king account for the expenditure of the grants. King Richard conceded on the understanding that it should not be regarded as a precedent but as a purely voluntary act by him. In 1404, under Henry IV, the Commons demanded that the accounts of the treasurer for war should be audited and laid before Parliament. Although King Henry replied that kings were not accountants, the Commons eventually achieved ascendancy over the king and over the hereditary upper chamber, the House of Lords, largely through the authority to control funds required by the monarch. As early as Edward III’s day (1327—77), it was becoming customary to attach conditions to money grants—the beginning of the modern system of appropriations. Parliament frequently insisted that grants of money be spent only for specific purposes. The first known instance of parliamentary appropriations by the Commons was in 1340, when a grant was made to Edward III on the condition, accepted by him, that all proceeds of the aid “shall be spent upon the maintenance and safeguard of our realm of England, and on wars in Scotland, France, and Gascoign, and in no places elsewhere.” After the Restoration (1660), the Commons actually aimed to keep the kings short of funds in order to prevent the maintenance of a large standing army in time of peace. In 1675, it was resolved that moneys for building ships “shall be made payable into the Exchequer, and shall be kept separate, distinct, and apart from all other monies, and shall be appropriated for the building and furnishing of ships, and that the account for the said supply shall be transmitted to the Commons of England in Parliament.” The English Bill of Rights, to which William III and Mary (1689-1702) were required to give their assent before Parliament would make them joint sovereigns, declared that levying money for the Crown or the use of the Crown without grant of Parliament for a longer time or in any other manner was illegal. The roots of the tree of legislative control over the public purse run deep in the soil of the centuries. Englishmen for hundreds of years spilled their blood to wrest this power over the purse from tyrannical monarchs and vest it in the hands of the elected representatives of the people in Commons. This is the taproot of the tree of English liberty. I quote from a speech by William Ewart Gladstone, prime minister of England, at Hastings in 1891: “The finance of the country is ultimately associated with the liberties of the country. It is a powerful leverage by which English liberty has been gradually acquired. If the House of Commons, by any possibility, lose the power of the control of the grants of public money, depend upon it, your very liberty will be worth very little in comparison. That powerful leverage has been what is commonly known as the power of the purse—the control of the House of Commons over public expenditure.” The principle of legislative control over money was brought to these shores by a natural process. Prior to the Constitution, prior even to Revolutionary tremors, elected representatives of the colonial legislatures had vested in them the power of the purse. That power later moved smoothly to the legislatures of the states between 1776 and 1787, and then on to the houses of Congress when the Constitution of 1787 was ratified. The power to appropriate moneys, under the U.S. Constitution, is vested by Article I, Section 9, solely in the legislative branch. Nowhere else. Not downtown. Not at the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue. Only here in the legislative branch—the people’s branch of government. There you have it. We need nothing more save, like the British people and our forefathers, vigilance in holding back tyranny. And thus we see where grasping presidents concentrate their efforts. George W. Bush and his ilk are not ignorant of the Constitution’s intent and yet they have diligently sought to coopt Congress’s power by cutting the strings attached to large appropriations. They wish, in consequence, to broaden White House authority and/or to transfer funds between appropriated accounts, and reallocate funds within accounts, without the bothersome hindrance of congressional oversight. A rogue White House is intent on calling the shots. Such funding machinations are plain to see in the creation of the Office of Homeland Security, the precursor to the Department of Homeland Security. Twenty-four hours after the Al Qaeda attack of 9/11 the President proposed appropriations language that would have provided “such sums as may be necessary to respond to the terrorist attacks on the United States that occurred on September 11, 2001.” No amounts or purposes were mentioned and no reporting or notification requirements listed. This end run was immediately rejected by both the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. The president had concurrently proposed a $20 billion Unanticipated Needs Fund. The funds could be used for any authorized purpose even remotely related to the attacks and could be allocated by the president after “consultation” with the House and Senate Appropriations Committees. Note the word “consultation.” No formal notification was proposed. On September 14, 2001, Congress approved a $40 billion supplemental, with $10 billion available to the president immediately, to be allocated by the president after consultation with the Appropriations Committees. Ten billion dollars was made available to the president, to be allocated after fifteen-day notification of the Appropriations Committees, and $20 billion was to be available only after Congress enacted an allocation of the funds in an Appropriations law (this $20 billion was subsequently included in the fiscal year 2002 Defense Appropriations Act, signed by the president on January 10, 2002). The president did allocate the $20 billion, but the consultation process was, at best, perfunctory. Byrd’s presentation of an historical perspective in Losing America will allow all readers to reflect on the foundations of the balance of power in America. If we want to keep this republic, we may need to have more Americans understand the reasons for the sharing of power among three branches of government. Steve Hopkins, November 26, 2004
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