Separation of powers is the E=mc2 of political science
Many can diagnose political diseases but only Madison had a cure
A recent article in the Nation Magazine by Jeff Faux masterfully describes the colossal dysfunctions of the American Empire.
But it is clueless about the Madisonian remedy. Not to pray that men can metamorphose into angels but to pit sordid ambition against ambition through the Constitution’s separation of powers to yield right decisions for wrong reasons or ulterior motives. The executive inherently tilts towards war to aggrandize power—an insatiable gratification that surpasses all others by many orders of magnitude. The legislative branch inherently resists war because legislators lose power and war is risky and the legislative branch is innately highly risk averse. No Congress has declared war except when requested by the President, and only after it was thought that an aggressor against the United States had already broken the peace. As late as 1870, the Senate refused President Grant’s plea to annex Santo Domingo for a U.S. naval base. The United States refused to become involved in the Central and South American revolts against the Spanish and Portuguese Empires. Neutrality was the watchword.
The Spanish-American War begot a huge wrecking ball against separation of powers by striking a Faustian bargain to exchange liberty and the march of the mind as the nation’s glory for global domination at the end of a bayonet. Power began hemorrhaging from the Congress to the White House. The last serious congressional effort to stop the hemorrhaging was the defeat of the League of Nations which would have surrendered the war power to the President. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge was Wilson’s bete noire out of personal hatred rather than from opposition to Empire, as he championed the Spanish-American war in chorus with war monger Theodore Roosevelt. Lodge did the right thing for the wrong reason, as Madison predicted.
All the United States needs to do to regain its erstwhile glory in foreign policy is to honor rather than dishonor the Constitution’s separation of powers. Do not be fooled by detractors who fantasize that a lobotomized or half-crazed Congress will recklessly declare war. Remember as recently as 2013 when even the likes of Ted Cruz and Tom Cotton with all other Members of Congress rebuffed Obama’s plea for a declaration of war against Syria over chemical weapons. Obama’s bill did not even make it out of Committee. And Congress similarly refused Clinton’s request for a declaration of war against Serbia because of the atrocities of Slobodan Milosevic in 1999. When it comes to declaring war, Congress does the right thing for the wrong reasons.
Understanding the centrality of separation of powers to liberty and prosperity—a structural bill of rights—requires a threshold of wisdom and learning that is unattainable in a society that revels in drivel, infantile amusements, hormonal gratifications, and the replacement of the alphabet with emojis. Even Madison had no answer for such ubiquitous stupidity and intellectual dormancy. But he knew the alarming consequence: “Knowledge will forever govern ignorance: and a people who mean to be their own governors, must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.”