To Provide for the Common Defense

...Reader responses to these modest efforts encourage me now to share my thoughts with you on a third matter, an old and perplexing problem: how to achieve security without losing liberty...

...Perspectives TO PROVIDE FOR THE COMMON DEFENSE BY PUBLIUS I Publius, intended to break silence only once after two centuries of withdrawal from active discourse about the nature of our Constitution...

...In effect, the checks we established no longer check—and the imbalance tips toward the "monarchy...

...Even the ardent love of liberty will, after a time, give way to its dictates...

...Our specifying that the choice be made from the top five reveals our expectation that, with the exception of General Washington, no candidate would win the necessary majority and that the House would, in effect, be picking the President...

...Since there were no national political parties at that time, and since each elector could vote his own conscience, it was our unstated assumption that the vote would typically be scattered among many candidates...

...Third, if the American people are properly informed of the potential peril represented by these necessary appendages, they will be—as they always have been—the ultimate check to a "monarchic" President...

...So I spoke again, this time on the true meaning of the "pursuit of happiness," explaining the social obligations implicit in that fertile phrase...

...Our reason was rooted in our knowledge of the many times a head of state had declared a war, raised an army, announced a national emergency, and then used the fomented circumstances to impose a tyranny on his own people...

...We went further, bolstering the power of Congress "to raise and support armies" by including the proviso that "no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years.' These joint constraints, intended to place a bit in the mouth of any runaway President, any American Caesar, were effective so long as the country kept a small standing army and was not involved in frequent hostilities, as we had envisioned...

...I remembered saying that "if all men were angels there would be no need for government," and I applied that view to the current international scene where even angels are not angelic...

...We know why our nation has become an armed camp, a modern Sparta: We live in a global village amid hostile neighbors...

...The military establishments that worried us most in our time were the standing armies of the separate states: During the era of the Articles of Confederation, they were either in imminent or active war against one another over matters such as trade, boundaries, even personal pique...

...As I pondered the dilemma, 1 found myself considering three separate lines of thought: First, if our "more perfect union" embraces more nations there will be less need for any secret agency...

...To be more safe, they at length become willing to run the risk of being less free...

...Tracing the perilous path of standing armies in the centuries following the Roman Empire, I noted that "the liberties of Europe have, with few exceptions, been the price of her military establishments...

...Even if such sums were limited to a term oftwo years, it would not be possible for Congress to oversee how or when or where the money isspcm...

...I had supposed that with a "more perfect union" armed conflicts among the states would be virtually eliminated and that, as in the case of England, "an insular position, and a powerful marine, guarding it in a great measure against the possibility of foreign invasion, supersede the necessity of a numerous army...

...Appropriations run to the hundreds of billions per annum...

...Safety from external danger,' I, Publius, wrote, "is the most powerful director of national conduct...

...How do we control an agency or agencies possessing the ability to conduct covert wars, to secretly raise money from foreign governments or from domestic donors, to pursue policies that have neither Presidential nor Congressional sanction, even to assassinate a President or a Presidential aspirant and enthrone a puppet who will declare a national emergency and suspend the Constitution...

...By their very nature, they operate outside the public ken...

...It was the determination to prevent such an eventuality that led us to frame Section 8 of Article 1. Over the last decades, however, I have observed many wars waged by our nation even though they were never declared...

...We find ourselves in the predicament of a Continental principality in the Europe of the 18th century—ever embroiled in a state of war or imminent war...

...Second, if the President and the Congress appoint a knowledgeable and morally committed person to head any such agency or agencies, we are more likely to interdict the perversion of covert operations...

...Let us beware that in our search for national security we do not lose our civil liberty, and let us scrutinize most intensely those who most intensely eschew scrutiny...

...With this in mind, we stipulated that "if no person have a majority then from the five highest on the list the said House shall in like manner choose the President...

...In the past half century, I have been increasingly disturbed by the rise of the "monarchic" Presidency, as I have witnessed power shift from the Legislature to the Executive, from an assembly that debates and deliberates to an individual subject to the wiles and guiles of those who dance attendance at the Presidential court...

...When I first discovered these extraconstitutional entities, my instinctive reaction was to declare them unconstitutional...

...But a larger body of experience, the annals of many nations over many centuries, revealed that while an armed force is imperative to protect our liberties against foreign aggression, the same military power could be used to suppress liberty at home...

...On second thought, my sense of reality caused me to hesitate...

...The usurpation of power implicit in the prosecution of undeclared wars might never have been possible if there had not been, at a much earlier time, a pronounced change in the way the President was elected...

...As a result, a secret sector of government—with para- and super-mjJitary involvements—has come into being, able to pursue policies not readily controlled by Congress (or even the President) because the policies are inescapably invisible...

...Yet if it is sufficiently covert, Congress may never discover what it is not told— the operation may be known only to the operators...

...it would not be necessary to erect a huge establishment against foreign aggression, since Providence had provided us with fortifications in the form of a gigantic ocean between us and Europe...

...We did not expect that a large standing army would be maintained by the new nation as a whole...

...This alteration was partly written into the Constitution as the 12th Amendment, but in reality it was primarily achieved through the development of new political practices...

...In the Preamble to the Constitution, we stated as one of our prime purposes to "provide for the common defense.' Our experience during the Revolution had proved to us both the need and the efficacy of a "common" effort to safeguard our shores against the heel of oppression...

...It is particularly the last thought that has spurred meto speak out once more...

...No longer beholden to Congress, the President could begin to think as a monarch, especially in international matters, with the "frequent hostilities" I warned about providing the pretext...

...The repeated involvement of the nation in military conflicts—declared or undeclared—adversely affects the balance between the Executive and the Legislature in ways that I, Publius, profoundly feared...

...But during the intervening 200 years circumstances changed...

...I was confident that the nation, through Congress, could keep a sharp eye on every military penny...

...My object was simply to propose that we seek a "more perfect union" in a world that has shrunk to a global village...

...The military now has a soldiery larger than the total population of all the colonies in 1780...

...What I wrote some two centuries ago in my Federalist Number 8 on the subject has, I believe, lost none of its cogency...

...On my own behalf, I must confess that I did have some misgivings about designating the President as Commander-in-Chief, and that, out of my distrust for empowering anyone with disproportionate authority, I was successful in imposing several checks on the Executive beyond simply giving Congress the final word on the declaration of wars...

...We provided that each member of the Electoral College was to cast two votes for President, with at least one vote going to a person who was not of the same state as the elector...

...As you may have guessed, we were afraid that without some such limitation being enforced every elector would cast two votes for someone from his own state...

...The practice of conducting undeclared wars, unanticipated by us, effectively negates the Congressional check on the Executive's power in foreign conflicts...

...oceans have shrunk to the size of lakes...

...But our expectation was very quickly exploded when national political parties were organized, with electors in each state pledged to some one Presidential candidate...

...I refer, of course, to such agencies as those engaged in "intelligence" and in "covert actions...

...Once that happened, the President was no longer dependent on Congress for his office...

...We could, of course, prescribe rules making it compulsory for any such agency to submit to Congressional oversight...

...We kept the purse strings in legislative hands, specifically in the House of Representatives...

...This might require an intelligence unit within each intelligence organization—an additional set of eyes facing inward...

...Several of these have been fought in Asia, a few more in the Caribbean—including one against a tiny island shamefully unworthy of our bother—and currently another looms on the horizon in the seas of Araby...

...I wrote that the condition of warfare "strengthens the executive arm of government: in doing which, constitutions would acquire a progressive direction toward monarchy...

...The violent destruction of life and property incident to war, the continual effort and alarm attendant onastateofcontinual danger, will compel nations the most attached to liberty to resort for repose and security to institutions which have a tendency to destroy their civil and political rights...

...In fact, many Presidents set themselves up as the voice of the people while stigmatizing the House of Representatives as an inchoate collection of pleaders for special interests, thereby investing the White House with superior moral authority...

...Had we foreseen the consequent imbalance between a monarchic Presidency and a democratic Congress, we may well have hesitated to name the President Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces...

...In Article II, the original part of the Constitution dealing with the selection of the Chief Executive, it was our intention to give the House of Representatives a major role in the process—thereby making the President indebted for his authority to Congress...

...We might have preferred a civilian commander, chosen by the President with the advice and consent of the House of Representatives, subject to mandatory periodic review...

...We have lost our insularity—economically, politically and geographically...

...My conclusion was that it would at present be naive and perhaps suicidal for our great nation to play its fated role on this planet without an agency that could operate outside the Marquis of Queensberry rules...

...missiles could strike us from the other side of the planet in the time it took me every morning to walk from my residence to the meeting room in Philadelphia...

...Having thus spoken silently to myself, my worry had come full circle: how to enjoy security without surrendering liberty...

...The continual necessity for their services enhances the condition of the soldier, and proportionably degrades the condition of the citizen...

...The military state becomes elevated above the civil...

...Consequently, as I have said: "The perpetual menacing of danger obliges the government to be always prepared to repel it—its armies must be numerous enough for instant defense...

...indeed, it has been repeatedly validated by events in country after country in the intervening decades...

...It is of the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of the legislative authority...

...Recently I have been re-examining the provisions we wrote into the Constitution to protect domestic liberty against the misuse of military power, checks that may once have been effective but are no longer...

...Over the years, these "correspondent appendages" have taken on definable dimensions despite their less definable functions...

...It then occurred to me that an enlarged union per se could be as oppressive as our "union" with the British crown if there was no moral basis for our planetary social order...

...It would be sufficient to have merely enough military power to halt a war between the states or to quell an uprising...

...The Constitution provides, for instance, that the power "to declare war" rests with the Congress...

...Whatever insights we enjoyed were informed bymuchof ancienthistory...

...The liberties of Rome," I wrote, "proved the final victim of her military triumphs...

...A Department of Dirty Tricks is "anecessaryevil," I recognized, recalling another phrase from my Federalist Number 8. It is necessary for our security...

...As I stated several times, one of the prime virtues of the Constitution was that a true union would "save America from as many standing armies as it may be split into States or Confederacies...

...In my concern about the dangers of an oversized army, I referred to "standing armies, and the correspondent appendages of military establishments...