CIAO DATE: 04/06

Why Do Some Legislators Go To Court? - Congress and the Lawsuit against President Reagan for Noncompliance with the War Powers Resolution

Abstract

During the late 1960s and early 1970s, the U.S. Congress became very concerned about the increasing role played by the President in foreign affairs. On November 7, 1973, and as a mechanism to diminish the power achieved by the Chief Executive in international matters, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution (WPR) over Richard Nixon's veto. The basic aim of the law was to prevent the President from unilaterally introducing the armed forces abroad without congressional authorization. In so doing, Congress sought "to fulfill the intent of the framers of the American Constitution."

Since its approval (and even prior to it), the resolution has been condemned by all American Presidents and harshly criticized by several scholars for being unconstitutional. Despite the different attacks, it has survived for almost two decades as the major expression of Congress' perhaps fruitless attempt to recuperate its role in the war-making authority.

In its seventeen years of existence, the WPR has been debated in the Legislature more than ten times but enacted only once (Lebanon). In most of these cases, Congress did little to reaffirm its role in the President's power to deploy armed forces abroad. However, during the Reagan administration the behavior of some sectors of the Legislature, especially within the House, changed substantially. Reagan's hard-line foreign policy provoked a permanent opposition on Capitol Hill, an opposition that used all its resources to restrain the international position of the Republican regime.

In this paper I will try to make a first and a very preliminary approximation of the study of the War Powers Resolution. The basic theme that will guide the following pages is the resolution in relation to three cases that occured during the Reagan administration: El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Kuwait. The similarity between them is that they are three cases in the history of the resolution in which some sectors of Congress have taken the President to court for noncompliance with the WPR.

Full Text (PDF, 35 pages, 2.38 MB)