Ambiguity Is Not the Problem
By Dahlia Lithwick on the new War Powers Commission and the new FISA revisions:
Our war-powers problems lie not so much in the failure of checks and balances, but in the fact that Congress is invariably comfortable opposing wars only in hindsight. This might explain the fact that Congress’ popularity ratings dipped into the single digits last week. It doesn’t change the fact that you can’t amend a statute that tried to get Congress to consult, with another statute that tries to get Congress to consult more. In a statement last week, even Warren Christopher conceded that “it comes down to questions of congressional will … to resist funding or to limit it. …. [T]here is nothing we can do by statute that will change that.”
This leads to the second mistaken premise behind the War Powers Commission: Baker and Christopher’s bipartisan belief that the core failure of the War Powers Act lies in its poorly drafted, ambiguous language. Consider last week’s Senate vote to amend the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act—the 1978 wiretapping law that made one guilty of a felony if one “engages in electronic surveillance under color of law except as authorized by statute.” That language is perfectly clear and unambiguous. Indeed, it’s so clear and unambiguous that last week a federal judge had no trouble determining that President Bush had violated it.
And yet last week the Senate voted to clarify FISA again. So, now the same electronic surveillance that was illegal when the president did it six years ago will be really, really illegal. Except when it’s not. The hope appears to be that this time, the president will abide by the law because it’s clearly written. But the problem with FISA was never that it was poorly or ambiguously drafted. The problem was with an overreaching executive that disregards crystal-clear, and also ambiguous, laws in about equal measure. I am hardly holding up the War Powers Act as a model of perfect clarity. But it already had consultation and reporting provisions, and yet nobody saw fit to consult or report. So, let’s stop blaming ambiguous torture, wiretapping, and war-declaring laws for our current situation. Let’s call executive overreaching what it is.
And needless to say, the circumstances of the passage of the new FISA legislation and the fact that Congress gave away the show makes is pretty clear that tougher oversight to ensure that the White House is hewing to the new, looser guidelines is unlikely to be forthcoming.
Posner and Vermeule make a similar point in their recent book, arguing all-too-convincingly that attempts to strengthen congressional power versus the executive when anything that can be defined as war powers are concerned are highly unlikely to work. Since their normative claim that this is a good thing is far less persuasive, it’s a depressing read.