"Power corrupts; absolute power is really neat!" So
joked Donald Regan, President Reagan's all-powerful chief of
staff. The 1987 Gridiron Dinner audience roared with laughter
because they knew it was true. So, too, did the classically
educated gentlemen who wrote the U.S. Constitution. They knew
also that Lord Acton's pre-Regan aphorism "Absolute power
corrupts absolutely"was equally true. Franklin, Madison,
Jefferson, Hamilton and their fellow drafters of the American
Constitution disagreed on many things, but all agreed that there
should be no absolute seat of power in the new government. Dispersal
of the police and military powers - the tools of tyranny -was
a high priority, and they achieved it by dividing them among
three separate branches. But some feared the possible tyranny
of the legislature - as in Cromwell's Parliament, for example
- while others feared the creation of a despotic executive like
George III. They could not agree on how precisely to allocate
those powers. The Constitution is therefore not precise, with
grants of power to each that overlap and even contradict, setting
up a permanent strugggle between the branches and leaving events
and politics to determine who rules. The framers consciously
chose to give up police, military and diplomatic efficiency
in order to prevent the consolidation of authority and the corruption
of absolute power. As we shall see, there is no perfect or preordained
balance between President and Congress on national security,
and recourse to the third branch - the judiciary - has resolved
only small facets of the issue. There are only the barest of
limits to the divided overlapping powers specified by the Constitution,
and there are the diverse practices of successive generations.
The balance has usually been set less by legalities than by
politics, more by urgent problems than ingenious theory. In
short, the "invitation to strife" issued by the founders
has been answered and attended by both president and Congress.
Often the Minuet has ended with blood on the floor.
A decade has passed since the end of the Cold War. The demise
of the Soviet Union concluded the most vulnerable period in
American history, a time when the possibility of nuclear attack
threatened the very existence of the United States. No wonder
then that Americans heaved a mighty sigh of relief, having survived
to watch the fall of their country's most powerful enemy. Our
new sense of security led to a predictable course of action.
We disarmed. Starting with the first Bush administration and
accelerating through both Clinton terms, the United States reduced
its military forces by 40 percent. National defense expenditures
in real terms (adjusted for inflation) dropped from $302.3 billion
in 1992 to $274.8 billion in 2000. The portion of the U.S. gross
national product devoted to defense shrank from 6.5 percent
in 1985 to just over 3.0 percent, a level not seen since the
1930s. Arguably this defense "dividend" made a major
contribution toward ending federal deficits.
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