Imperial conservatives?

In the early Fifties, conservatives were combating the proto-Imperial Presidency, now the enemy of choice has become the Imperial Congress. But the way to resist a left-leaning, irresponsible legislature, the author contend,s is not to put more power in the hands of the Secretary of State.

AMERICAN CONSERVATIVES have come a long way since 1952, when Ohio's Senator John Bricker introduced a constitutional amendment to restrict the President's treaty-making power. Perhaps they've come too far. Today nothing brings foam to the conservative mandible more reliably than a favorable allusion to the Boland Amendments or the War Powers Act, and cries against "congressional micromanagement" and "535 Secretaries of State" became watchwords among Washington conservatives during the Reagan Presidency.

John Bricker certainly would never have endorsed either Boland or War Powers-both are stupid measures, the one as harmful as the other is frivolous-but he surely would have agreed with their basic assumption of legislative supremacy. The idea that the legislative branch has a vital role to play in the conduct of U.S. foreign policy and the disposition of American troops was fundamental to the principles espoused by Bricker, Robert Taft, Barry Goldwater, and other spokesmen of the Right. Taft, in the words of Russell Kirk and James McClellan, asserted "the right and the necessity, in the American democratic republic, for Congress to participate with the executive in the conduct of foreign affairs," and "Mr. Republican" himself wrote in A Foreign Policy for Americans:

If in the great field of foreign policy the President has the arbitrary and unlimited powers he now claims, then there is an end to freedom in the United States not only in the foreign field but in the great realm of domestic activity which necessarily follows any foreign commitments.

In a recent issue of Policy Review, Representative Mickey Edwards undertook to articulate and defend the Taft-Bricker view that the U.S. Congress has a strong role in foreign policy. He did so with learning and eloquence, urging that the intent of the Framers and the conservative principles that "the separation of powers and the balance of powers were the greatest protectors of our freedoms" support his conclusion that "foreign policy is an arena in which the powers and responsibilities of the Congress and the executive share a poorly defined playing field, each with important roles to play." But Mr. Edwards's effort, valiant as it was, has generally been greeted ferociously by his conservative critics and colleagues.

Nevertheless, conservatives ought to pause and re-trace the steps that have brought them close to being what Mr. Edwards calls "New Age monarchists." Constitutional arguments aside, there are plenty of sound pragmatic reasons for conservatives to defend a strong congressional role in foreign policy. Even under Mr. Reagan, conservatives in the Senate and House were vital in resisting efforts to circumvent the Taiwan Relations Act and adhere to the unratified SALT 11 treaty, among other silly State Department ideas. And senatorial efforts have not stopped there. Conservative Republicans like New Hampshire's Gordon Humphrey have been instrumental in pushing the Administration into greater support for the Afghan resistance. Moderate Democrats like Arizona's Dennis DeConcini have played similar roles with policies toward Angola's UNITA. Steve Symms, Orrin Hatch, the late John East, and Jeremiah Denton have all at one time or another (and Jesse Helms in some fields almost continuously) opposed executive-branch policies on arms control, trade with the Soviet bloc, and involvements with Latin America, southern Africa, and the Far East. If such congressional activities aren't "micromanagement," the term has little meaning.

YET MOST conservatives, even while denouncing micromanagement, have applauded all these instances of it. Their view of who should run U.S. foreign policy seems to be approaching incoherence, and as Mr. Edwards warns, "conservatives need to remember that the powers we would give to a Ronald Reagan or a George Bush will someday be used by a Walter Mondale or a Michael Dukakis." Indeed, as recent history shows, these powers are already being used by a foreign-policy bureaucracy uncontrolled by elections and often independent of Congress and President alike.

It's easy for conservatives today to defend virtually exclusive presidential powers in foreign affairs by citing not only left-wing congressional partisanism in foreign policy but also clear instances of legislative irresponsibility: security leaks, junketeering that compromises official U.S. policy, and general dithering, appeasement, and catering to special interests. But the conservative shift in perspective on Congress and the Presidency transcends current policy disputes and partisan bickering. It implies, logically and eventually in practice, a decisive erosion of some of the fundamental premises of conservative thought on which a good many conservative positions depend.

No conservative theorist has articulated these premises and their connection with congressional authority more clearly than the late James Burnham in his 1959 Congress and the American Tradition. Long before Arthur Schlesinger discovered th"Imperial Presidency" (after serving it and salivating over it for most of his life), Burnham, as William F. Buckley Jr. wrote in 1973, carefully charted "the usurpations of power by thc executive over a generation, done needless to say to the elated applause of liberal intellectuals."

Congress and the American Tradition is a work that must be read on two levels. On one level, it is an exposition of the historical and theoretical role of Congress and an account of the eventual capture of that role by the executive branch. On another level, however, the book is a study of why the survival of congressional authority is essential for the survival of political freedom.

Burnham saw the rise of the Presidency as an integral part of the world-historical transformation that in 1940 he labeled "the managerial revolution": the displacement, by massive, bureaucratically controlled organizations, of smallscale private capitalism, constitutionalist, parliamentary government, and the independent and sovereign nation-state. A new elite, the managerial class, was emerging into economic, political, and cultural dominance. The supposed need for centralized social and economic management, lodged in the federal bureaucracy and circumventing local and congressional resistance through direct appeals to the mass electorate, was the main rationale that the new class and its intellectual apologists articulated. "These tendencies," Burnham wrote in Congress and the American Tradition, "- democratist, plebiscitary, bureaucratic, centralist, Caesarean-are the political phase of the general historical transformation of our era that in 1940 I named 'the managerial revolution."'

The threat represented by this "political phase" was the curtailment of the social basis of political freedom in intermediary institutions, through which the deliberate and refracted will of the national community is expressed. "Within the United States today," wrote Burnham, "Congress is in existing fact the prime intermediary institution, the chief political organ of the people as distinguished from the masses, tbe one body to which the citizenry can now appeal for redress not merely from individual despotic acts . . . but ftom large-scale despotic innovations, trends, and principles."

Although Burnham himself was a strong advocate of a vigorous international role for the United States, he saw the erosion of the treaty-making and war powers of Congress and their effective transfer to the Presidency (in reality, lo the executive-branch bureaucracy that is part of or sibling to the managerial class) as a threat to both freedom and national sovereignty. Presidents, untrammeled by congressional restraints, could make executive agreements and treaties that substantially changed U.S. and state laws. They could commit American troops to foreign conflicts without adequate national consensus or even pro forma congressional consent, and (as Truman tried to do in seizing the steel mills) they could threaten individual liberties by invoking "national emergency." The tendency of the managerial revolution to consolidate independent national states into integrated, supra-national blocs and thereby to supersede national sovereignty was manifest in the United Nations treaty, regional or global security pacts, and collective treaties that overrode the legal and institutional arrangements of particular nations and cultures.

It is precisely because of such tendencies, executed in the name of "world peace," "the global economy," and "transnational issues" and generally emanating from the executive branch, that congressional conservatives today resist monopolization of foreign policy by the executive as they resisted it in the days of Bricker and Taft. Despite the institutional corruption of Congress by its own absorption into the "administrative state" (another label for the "managerial state," applied by the Heritage Foundation's recent volume on The Imperial Congress), at least some states and congressional districts and their representatives retain sufficient autonomy to offer an effective brake on pernicious executive-branch policies. Conservatives may well support Presidents like Ronald Reagan who seek to restore strength abroadin opposition to partisan and ideological distraction within Congress; but to leap from such practical measures to a philosophic defense of a presidential monopoly in foreign policy could lead alarmingly close to compromising traditional conservative commitments to limited government and national independence.

The original idea of postwar American conservatism in general and of the "Reagan Revolution" in particular was not simply to take over the American mega-state but to begin dismantling it; not for conservatives to lodge themselves in the institutional woodwork of the federal bureaucracy but to start reducing its size, its costs, its personnel, and its powers. That goal involved deregulation of the economy and restoration of authority and independence to states and localities, but also a diminution of the powers of the Presidency and an augmentation of the powers of Congress as the representative of state and local communities, the expression of the deliberate sense of the American people. Not only has that goal not been achieved, but there has appeared a body of ideas supporting a shift in the goal itself, the beginnings of a theoretical justification on ostensibly conservative grounds of the mega-state and of the centralized power of the Presidency as its core. In recapitulating the liberal defense of the "Imperial Presidency," conservatives may soon find themselves metamorphosing into something they never wanted to be.