A $1.5 Trillion Test of Whether Power Still Answers to the People

The report is stark enough: the president of the United States has temporarily ended many restrictions on Moscow that Congress only lately imposed, pleading “national security” as his reason. At the same time, his Pentagon chief presses the legislature to grant a record $1.5 trillion defense budget, styled a “one-time generational investment” to fulfil presidential security priorities, and speaks of pushing this through “regardless” of the election’s result, relying on members who will feel “unshackled from their responsibility to be in lock step with the president.” In so few lines we have the whole modern drama: sanctions undone by executive hand, treasure demanded in extraordinary sums, and a political class urged to spend as if freed from answer to their constituents.

When I wrote in the Second Treatise that political power is a right of making laws with penalties only for the public good, I meant to bind rulers as well as subjects. No man is born with a natural title to command another; men are naturally free, equal, and independent, and can be subjected only by their own consent, given to protect their lives, liberties, and estates. Thus every magistrate, however adorned with office, holds authority but on trust, and that trust has a fixed end: not his own glory, not the aggrandisement of a court or a war-office, but the safety and quiet possession of the people. The burden of proof therefore always sits on power. It is not for the citizen to prove why the ruler should not have such discretion; it is for the ruler to show why such discretion is necessary for the common good.

Here two kinds of power are in question. First, the negative power to suspend sanctions that the legislature, acting in its ordinary course, has lately established against a foreign power. Secondly, the positive power to draw from the people, by their representatives, an immense mass of treasure under the name of defence. Both may in some cases be lawful exercises of what I called prerogative: that is, a power in the executive to act for the public good, without a rule, and sometimes even against the letter of it, when the law is silent or manifestly unfit to the present emergency. But such a power is a dangerous instrument. It is tolerable only while it is visibly employed for the people’s benefit, openly accountable, and plainly revocable when the emergency ends.

On the suspension of sanctions, I must observe how little is here yet shown to the understanding. We are told they were recently passed by Congress, and that the president has now waived “many restrictions” upon Moscow, once again for “national security.” But those same words will serve a wise measure and a foolish, a just and an unjust, as easily as they will a wise or foolish sermon. Which danger is averted by this indulgence toward Moscow? Which new necessity has arisen since the legislature spoke? What safeguards ensure that a temporary waiver does not by repetition become the new standing rule? Until such questions are plainly answered, an executive that undoes the declared will of the legislative begins to look less like a faithful steward and more like a power judging in its own case.

The demand for a $1.5 trillion “one-time generational investment” in arms raises the same question, not of military prudence (of which I pretend no special knowledge), but of political right. Large defence may be a public good; a nation may rationally provide enough, and as good, means for its self-preservation. Yet the manner of asking and the language used betray a temper worth noting. When a minister boasts that he will drive this funding “regardless” of midterm results, leaning on members who, being near departure, feel “unshackled” from their former responsibility to keep step with the president, I hear an invitation to spend without fear of the people’s judgment. But representatives, whether returning or not, are bound to their constituents by the same trust to the last hour of their commission.

Some will object that in matters of war and peace, ordinary consent must retreat before expertise; that those who see the intelligence must be allowed a wide, and largely unquestioned, sphere of discretion. I grant that in sudden danger there is no time for the slow forms of law, and in such moments the executive may rightly act upon his own understanding for the public preservation. Yet, as I argued when treating of prerogative, this is a power that lives by constant appeal to the people’s later judgment. It must come back under law as soon as the occasion permits; it must be examinable by an impartial public and by their representatives; and it must never be entrenched as the new ordinary course. Otherwise, what began as necessity hardens into a permanent claim to rule by secret reasons.

From the few facts reported, I do not see yet a long train of abuses tending one and the same way, which alone would warrant the dissolution of a government. But I see the beginnings of a dangerous habit: recourse to “national security” to overrule recent law; a relish for immense expenditure driven “regardless” of electoral correction; a politics in which representatives speak of being “unshackled” not to better serve the people, but to serve more freely the will of the executive. The remedy, while the frame of government remains, is rigorous oversight, a legislative jealous of its own authority, and a people who remember that their rulers are but men like themselves, set over them not as masters, but as servants on trust. The moment that trust is treated as property and not as stewardship, the slide from government to usurpation has already begun.