Franklin D. Roosevelt once remarked: “It is the duty of the president to propose and it is the privilege of Congress to dispose.” A few years later, the political scientist Edward S. Corwin affirmed Roosevelt’s observation, writing that, “actual practice under the Constitution has shown that while the president is usually in a position to propose, the Senate and Congress are often in a technical position at least to dispose.” Roosevelt’s remark was prompted by questions from reporters about his attempts to persuade Alben Barkley (D-Ky.) to lead the effort inside the Senate to pass legislation expanding the size of the Supreme Court. In a string of rulings, the Court’s conservative majority declared parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal agenda unconstitutional. In response, the president asserted that the Constitution gave the legislative branch, not the judiciary, the power to make law. Moreover, he cast his subsequent effort to dilute the power of the Court’s conservative justices by increasing the number of justices who sat on it as protecting Congress’s constitutional powers.
However, Roosevelt left unsaid the extent to which he too had encroached on Congress’s prerogative to make law during his time in office. Roosevelt’s efforts to pressure Congress to approve his court-packing plan, albeit unsuccessful, are illustrative of his tendency to intervene directly in the deliberations of Congress to ensure that his preferred policy outcome prevailed. In doing so, Roosevelt altered the relationship between Congress and the president in the policy process, especially regarding questions of foreign policy. Before his tenure, presidents had generally tried to influence that process by blocking policies with which they disagreed. After it, presidents tried to influence them proactively by intervening in Congress’s internal operations.
However, despite this shift, the balance of power between Congress and the president in the policy process remains dynamic. That is, the relationship is always in flux, even regarding foreign policy, which observers have generally considered as dominated by the president. This is because “the power to determine the substantive content of American foreign policy is a divided power.” Specifically, the Constitution empowers both Congress and the president to participate in the foreign policymaking process, albeit in different ways. This leads to institutionalized competition between the two branches of government, an arrangement Corwin cast as “an invitation to struggle for the privilege of directing American foreign policy.” Lee Hamilton, a longtime member of the House of Representatives and widely acknowledged expert on foreign policy, calls the struggle between Congress and the president: “an- going tug of war to determine the appropriate balance of power for making policy.” Another scholar and former State Department official characterizes the shifting locus of power in foreign policymaking as a pendulum that swings back and forth between the two branches.
Which branch prevails in the struggle, or where that pendulum stops, depends ultimately on how effectively Congress and the president use their constitutional powers amidst domestic and international environments that are continually changing. For example, the president’s dominance of the foreign policymaking process after World War II succumbed to resurgent congressional activism in the 1970s, as the willingness of both Democrats and Republicans to assert themselves increased in response to presidential failures in Vietnam, as well as growing public concern about security policy more broadly. By 1986, one former State Department official observed that: “congressional activism on foreign policy is now a fact of life.” A decade earlier, Henry Kissinger, then-Secretary of State, a former National Security Advisor and a long-time foreign policy maven proclaimed: “The decade-long struggle in this country over executive dominance in foreign affairs is over. The recognition that Congress is a coequal branch of government is the dominant fact of national politics today.”
However, beginning in 2001, the pendulum began to swing back toward the president, as Congress deferred to George W. Bush’s formulation of foreign policy and the war on terror in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks. Most recently, bipartisan opposition to President Trump’s decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Syria, as well as concern among Democrats and Republicans about his foreign policy more generally, suggest that the pendulum could, once again, swing back toward Congress in the years ahead.
To better understand what happens when the pendulum of power swings back and forth between Congress and the president, this paper examines the procedural and strategic dynamics that underlie the struggle between the two branches in the foreign policymaking process. It begins by surveying the constitutional framework in which Congress and the president compete for influence. It then details each branch’s respective powers under the Constitution and details two strategies presidents have used to compensate for their relative lack of formal power to influence the foreign policymaking process. The paper then examines how the struggle over foreign policy has impacted the general nature of policy outcomes more generally, and concludes by considering the internal challenges Congress must overcome to reassert itself in foreign policymaking in the years ahead.
