Let’s hope if any effort to prescribe conditions for troop deployment ever reaches a president’s desk, that president — whether it is President Bush or any future president, Republican or Democrat — has the good sense to veto it. It would be unconstitutional.
The president is commander-in-chief. That is not just a title; it is an assignment of constitutional duties that may not be performed by any other branch.
Congress can deny him funding; it cannot exercise commander-in-chief functions. Rotating troops and assigning materiel for military engagements is an executive function — just like deciding which target to hit, which hill to take, and which captives to detain.
If Congress wants to end the war, Congress can end it by de-funding it. Then the president has to bring everyone and everything home — and members of Congress can then be politically accountable to the voters for the decision to abandon the battlefield before the President believed the mission was completed. Congress, however, cannot manage, much less micro-manage, the exercise of commander-in-chief authority in connection with military engagements that are authorized either by Congress or under the President’s inherent Article II authority. It is for the president alone to exercise that power.
And what if the United States is invaded, or if our forces and interests are attacked overseas (as, for example, they have been repeatedly since 1996, and as they are currently being attacked from Iran and Pakistan, as well as Iraq and Afghanistan)? The Supreme Court has held since the Civil War era Prize Cases that the president has not only the authority but the duty to respond to provocations against the United States, regardless of whether Congress has acted. But would a president be expected to wait to dispatch forces until the Murtha two-year lay-off has run its course?
In The Federalist No. 73, Hamilton explained that the Constitution armed the executive with vigor and irreducible powers in order to defend against “the propensity of the legislative department to intrude upon the rights, and to absorb the powers, of the other departments.”
Smart guys, the Framers.