Word: congression
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
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...
...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...
...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...
...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...