National security and the article II shell game.

• Author: Kitrosser, Heidi
• Position: Presidential Power in the Obama Administration: Early Reflections

INTRODUCTION

This essay considers the important but under-explored link between politics and constitutional interpretation in the realm of national security. The school of constitutional interpretation at which it looks is "presidential exclusivity," which has gone from relative obscurity to prominence in the political branches and in public debate over the past several decades. Exclusivists deem the President to have substantial discretion under Article II of the Constitution "to override statutory limits that he believes interfere with his ability to protect national security." (1) Exclusivists often claim that they champion a return to the presidency's traditional role. (2) Yet other scholars, particularly David Barron and Martin Lederman in a two-article series in the Harvard Law Review, have shown that exclusivity has only recently become a presence, let alone a prominent and influential one, in the political branches. (3)

The first question that this essay takes up is why exclusivity has come so far over the past several decades in the political branches and why it has demonstrated appeal and staying power across parties. Such a question admittedly lends itself to no magic bullets, no one factor or handful of factors to explain everything. Yet logic suggests that political incentives must constitute at least an important piece of the puzzle, and that is the piece on which this essay focuses.

The upshot is this: Since roughly the end of World War II, with a notable exception in the post-Watergate period, it has increasingly been in the interests of congresspersons to be perceived as non-obstructionist toward whatever activities the President deems necessary to advance national security. To avoid the dreaded "weak on national security" label, and to balance that avoidance against the risk of seeming either a presidential lackey (particularly if the President is of a different party) or of being implicated should scandals emerge (think Iran Contra or Abu Ghraib), congresspersons are generally best off appearing tough and resolute, while retaining the ability to plead ignorance should things turn out badly. These incentives are captured in a statement reportedly made in 1973 by Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman John Stennis (D-Miss.) to CIA Director James Schlesinger: "'Just go ahead and do it, but I don't want to know!'" (4) Other former CIA Directors corroborate the ubiquity of this attitude among members of Congress. For example, former Director William Colby has said that "Congress is informed to the degree that Congress wants to be informed" and "'stressed ... that several [congressional] overseers had expressed little interest in briefings from the CIA.'" (5) Happily for the President, these incentives complement his own. If it is politically problematic for a congressperson to be perceived as "weak on national security," it is the kiss of death for a President or presidential candidate. The President must straddle the line in public perception between seeming willing to "do whatever it takes" to protect national security and being able to credibly invoke American ideals of fairness and the rule of law. Of course, the President is also deeply invested in avoiding scandal, or at minimum, retaining plausible deniability should scandal develop over national security activities.

Exclusivity, then, aligns with the political interests of nearly everyone in national political life. Embracing exclusivity enables Presidents and congresspersons to associate themselves with the iconic image of a tough President and to situate their allegiance to that image in a larger narrative of keeping faith with the Constitution. Furthermore, making or acquiescing in exclusivity claims enables one to suggest that the Constitution simply ties their hands, preventing them, for instance, from disclosing or demanding information or taking a clear, public stand on a controversial matter. While this is not the only explanation for exclusivity's rise in ubiquity and legitimacy among the political branches over the past several decades, it is an important part of the picture.

This essay also considers how exclusivity manifests itself in the political branches. Exclusivity's manifestations are closely linked to its political appeal. The latter is contingent, after all, on the uses to which political actors are able to put exclusivity. In this respect, this essay observes that political branch players benefit as much if not more from exclusivity's shadow effect as from their invoking it explicitly. For example, however weak exclusivist arguments might be to the effect that the President had a constitutional power to secretly circumvent the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act ("FISA") for several years, the frequent repetition of these arguments by administration defenders created a fog of uncertainty around the issue among the public. This fog makes it more politically palatable for others, without invoking exclusivity explicitly, to suggest that the matter comes down to mere political differences, or that it is simply best to look ahead rather than to linger on complex questions of legal culpability.

This essay also explains that the combined effect of exclusivity's many active and passive uses is that of an elaborate shell game. In this "Article II shell game," accountability is the palmed object and potential accountability mechanisms are the shells. (6) If the game is well played, the public will often be told that accountability does not lie under one shell for exclusivist reasons, but that it may lie under the next shell, only for the process to repeat ad infinitum. For example, Congress may retroactively immunize certain groups for alleged statutory violations, partly on the basis that the legality question is uncertain in light of exclusivity. Members of Congress or witnesses supporting retroactive liability may argue, however, that other means for investigation exist such as congressional hearings. Later, those same persons or others may argue that congressional hearings ought not to occur or must be very narrow to avoid unveiling information that the President alone has the constitutional power--again, from an exclusivist perspective--to determine whether to reveal. To be clear, my claim is not that each participant subjectively intends, at the time that they raise a particular Article II objection, to close off other accountability avenues and thus to partake in a shell game. Rather, my point is that the increasing presence and perceived legitimacy of exclusivist arguments--and the incentive of political branch actors to raise or acquiesce in exclusivist claims or to benefit from their shadow effect--give rise to multiple, often successive exclusivist blocks to accountability. Thus, the effect is like that of a coordinated shell game.

Part I of this essay discusses historical and cultural changes that make exclusivity increasingly attractive politically to Presidents and congresspersons alike. Part II summarizes some of the major ways in which politicians actively make use of, or passively benefit from, exclusivist invocations of Article II. Part III demonstrates that the overall effect of such uses is that of an elaborate shell game across branches, parties, and administrations. It illustrates this phenomenon through the example of the Bush Administration's "Terrorist Surveillance Program," or "TSP." Exclusivity contributed to the program's years-long secrecy, defenses of it after it was publicly revealed, and efforts across the Bush and Obama administrations to shield its participants from accountability.

1. THE AGGRESSION HEURISTIC, THE RULE OF LAW IDEAL, AND PARTISANSHIP: THE POLITICS OF NATIONAL SECURITY

   1. THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE AND THE AGGRESSION HEURISTIC

      While the United States was born out of war and was no stranger to war for its first two centuries,

      [i]t was not until the Second World War that the United States, which heretofore had maintained small military budgets and a modest regular army, experienced a dramatic change in its world view. From then on this country has operated on the assumption that it faced a permanent national security emergency that had to be handled primarily by military means.... Mobilization of the society for 'national security' has long been the substitute for total war. (7) While this passage was published in the midst of the Cold War, the staying power of the "national security state" (8) that it describes was evidenced throughout the nineteen-nineties, when the large-scale military and national security infrastructure that had been built up since the Second World War--what President Eisenhower famously called "the military-industrial complex" (9)--continued, in some respects even broadened its activities, with retooled justifications. (10) As historian Andrew J. Bacevich puts it, "at the end of the Cold War, Americans said yes to military power." (11) From this perspective, Bacevich explains, the U.S. response to the tragic events of September 11th "demonstrates how little the unprecedented attacks [of that day] affected the assumptions underlying U.S. foreign policy; the terrorists succeeded only in reinvigorating the conviction that destiny summons the United States" and that military power is the means to achieve that destiny. (12)

      The rise of the national security state caused two crucially important shifts in American life and government. First, while the Constitution's founders detested the notion of a large standing army and took steps to ensure against the same, the U.S. now has a sprawling military and national security infrastructure etched deeply into its architecture. As late as 1939, the United States had only "a small standing army, spent 1.4% of the gross national product on defense, [and] had a handful of foreign bases." (13) While annual defense spending in the years since the end of World War II has had its relative ups and downs, it has...