The man who tried to rein in presidential war powers
Clement Zablocki's long battle
“A conciliator, not a firebrand.” That was how the New York Times’ Steven V. Roberts described Rep. Clement J. Zablocki in his obituary December 4, 1983. The Democrat from Milwaukee “preferred consensus to confrontation” and was known for “a bushy mustache he kept carefully clipped, and a tiny, leather-bound pipe he kept clasped in his hand.”
He also played a key role in the long history of disputes between presidents and Congress over who controls the power to go to war. Zablocki sponsored the War Powers Act, a 1973 law that surfaces whenever a president orders military action.
His career vividly demonstrates the potential for — and the limits of — congressional control of war powers.
After U.S. bombers struck three targets in Iran Saturday, the Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer said, “We must enforce the War Powers Act.” He insisted, “No president should be allowed to unilaterally march this nation into something as consequential as war with erratic threats and no strategy.”
Sen. Mike Rounds, a Republican from South Dakota, said on NewsNation that the Trump administration had complied with the law by notifying congressional leaders within 48 hours of the U.S. strike on three targets in Iran.
In practical terms, members of Congress had little need for that notification. All they had to do was read the news alerts or check their social feeds to find out that Trump had ordered the air strikes. The 48-hour notification requirement is not nearly as significant as other parts of the War Powers Act.
The law seeks to “fulfill the intent of the framers of the Constitution” and “insure that the collective judgment of both the Congress and the President” will govern the use of military force. It says presidents have the power to deploy the military in three circumstances: when Congress declares war, when it passes a law authorizing the use of force or when the nation is attacked.
Whenever possible, the president should consult Congress in advance, the law states; and should submit a report within 48 hours giving the reasons for the military action and estimating its scope and duration. That report starts a 60-day clock, giving the president a deadline to end the military mission unless Congress authorizes it to continue.
President Richard Nixon vetoed the War Powers legislation in November, 1973, but the House overrode him with a vote of 284-135, as did the Senate, voting 75-18 to make it the law of the land.
Since Nixon, many presidents have chafed at the restrictions of the law, questioning its constitutionality. That helps explain why the law ensnared Clement Zablocki in a tense confrontation with the Ronald Reagan administration just a few months before the congressman’s death at the age of 71.
The organist
Zablocki’s parents came to the U.S. from Poland. He grew up in a working-class Milwaukee neighborhood, putting himself through Marquette University by working as a choir director and church organist. He went on to teach high school civics and then put his classroom lessons into practice by winning a seat in the Wisconsin legislature. In 1948, he moved up to a seat in Congress.
“Clem,” as his colleagues knew him, was elected to the House a total of 18 times. He gained an appreciation for the conservative politics of most of his constituents. “They’re supportive of a strong national defense, and are fiercely anti-Communist, and in that respect I reflect their views to a T,” Zablocki said in an interview quoted by Steven Roberts.
In August, 1964, President Lyndon Johnson asked for the support of Congress after he ordered a military response to apparent attacks on U.S. destroyers in the Gulf of Tonkin, near the Communist nation of North Vietnam.
Zablocki cast his vote in the House for the “Gulf of Tonkin Resolution”; it was unanimous. In the Senate, only two senators dissented. Congress little suspected that this resolution would be used by Johnson and Nixon to justify nearly a decade of war in Southeast Asia, resulting in more than 58,000 deaths of U.S. service members.
Constitutional conflict
The Constitution gives Congress the sole power to “declare war” but it also names the president “commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States.”
Therein lies the clash that has set Congress against the White House over war powers for generations.
While Congress was pivotal in authorizing America’s involvement in World War II, with its declarations of war against Japan, Germany and the rest of the Axis powers, the Korean War unfolded without an official declaration of war. More than 36,000 Americans died in that conflict.
In an article for the Loyola of Los Angeles Law Review written shortly before his death, Zablocki makes his interpretation of the Constitution clear: “While some of the Founding Fathers were concerned about this issue, James Madison commented that the executive has no right, in any case, to decide whether there is cause for declaring war. Madison added that the power of judging the causes of war rests exclusively with the legislative branch. In short, there is nothing vague or amorphous about who receives the vast bulk of war powers under the Constitution. It is Congress.”
Revelations about the Vietnam War and the secret bombing of Cambodia helped fuel the passage of the War Powers Act. Nixon’s ability to fend off the legislation was greatly weakened by the Watergate scandal.
Once the bill became law, presidents paid it little heed. Zablocki was dissatisfied with the Gerald Ford administration’s view of the War Powers Act as it applied to Ford’s bid to rescue Americans on the cargo ship SS Mayaguez in 1975.
The congressman also objected that President Jimmy Carter’s administration didn’t comply with the War Powers Act when it staged an unsuccessful effort in 1980 to rescue the American hostages held by Iran.
Zablocki wrote that under Ford and Carter, “executive branch compliance was half-hearted at best and deliberately evasive at worst.” But he conceded that these rescue missions weren’t on nearly the same scale as wars such as Vietnam.
Lebanon
So in his view, the “first real test” of the War Powers Act came under President Ronald Reagan. In 1982, the Reagan administration provided U.S. troops for a peacekeeping force to oversee the evacuation of the Palestine Liberation Organization and Syrian troops from Beirut, Lebanon. Some members of Congress were “highly skeptical” of using the U.S. military in Lebanon, and Zablocki wrote to Reagan complaining that the White House wasn’t following the rules embodied in the War Powers Act.
In March, 1983, five Marines were wounded in a terrorist attack. In August, two Marines died from a mortar attack and two more were killed in early September. Finally, in August, one year after the Marines were deployed to Lebanon, Reagan instructed his chief of staff James Baker to meet with congressional leaders to gain their approval for the mission.
Speaker Tip O’Neill told the Reagan team he wouldn’t approve “another Tonkin Gulf resolution.” Negotiations between Zablocki and the Reagan team resulted in a compromise: Congress would authorize the deployment of no more than 1,600 troops in Lebanon for an 18-month period, much longer than the 60 days laid out in the War Powers Act.
The Lebanon resolution laid down numerous other conditions. It was approved overwhelmingly in the House and more narrowly in the Senate. Reagan signed the resolution on October 12, 1983. Zablocki called it “an extremely meaningful executive branch acceptance of the War Powers Resolution.”
But two weeks after signing the resolution, Reagan ordered the invasion of the island of Grenada. “Only thirteen days later, the old pattern of evasive executive non-compliance had once again appeared,” Zablocki wrote.
Disaster
The congressional debate over committing troops to Lebanon took place as conditions deteriorated on the ground. On April 18, 1983, a suicide bomber had detonated a car bomb at the U.S. embassy in Beirut; 63 people were killed.
Worse followed on October 23. “A dump truck packed with an estimated 12,000 pounds (5,400 kg) of explosives crashed through the front gates of the U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut,” as the Encylopaedia Brittanica noted. “The detonation ripped the four-story building from its foundation, and the barracks imploded in a matter of seconds. The 241 marines and sailors killed in the explosion represented the largest loss of life in a single day for the Marine Corps since the Battle of Iwo Jima in 1945.”
The congressional resolution had given the Reagan administration until May, 1985 to withdraw the Marines from Lebanon. But as a result of the horrific bombing, Reagan pulled out nearly all of the troops within four months.
Zablocki didn’t live to see that moment; he was working in his congressional office when he suffered a heart attack on November 30, 1983. He died three days later.
A chilling sidelight to the bombing story was reported by the Miami Herald in December, 1986. The U.S. National Security Agency “intercepted diplomatic messages in 1983 showing that the government of Iran ordered and financed the Beirut bombings.” Iran sent more than $1 million to its embassy in Beirut, where it was used to launch the terrorist attack.
Last July, Fouad Shukur, a Hezbollah commander who the United States had blamed for the bombing of the Marine barracks, was killed in an Israeli airstrike.
If nothing else, these events show how long conflicts and controversies can last.
The debate over the War Powers Act endures 51 years after it became law. It cast a shadow over many presidential uses of military force, including the Bush administration’s war against Iraq. And as we saw this weekend, the American confrontation with Iran and its proxies continues 41 years after the killing of 241 Marines and sailors in a cinder-block building in Beirut.
‘One person decides’
On January 3, 2020, a drone strike ordered by President Trump killed Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani at Baghdad International Airport. National Security Adviser Robert O’Brien improbably claimed that the attack was, in part, carried out under the provisions of the 2002 Authorization for Use of Military Force passed by Congress. That resolution authorized military action against Iraq, not Iran, in a war that ended years earlier.
After the Soleimani strike, Jack Goldsmith, a law professor who served in the Justice Department and Department of Defense under the George W. Bush administration, wrote, “over the years I have grown very cynical about the supposed legal constraints” on president’s war powers. Both parties, he noted, acquiesced to presidents with expansive views of their authority.
“In short, our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war,” Goldsmith wrote. “That is our system: One person decides.”
In a turbulent world, there’s some logic in granting presidents the power to respond nimbly to changing events. The multi-headed beast that is Congress cannot react nearly as quickly to security threats.
And yet Clement Zablocki and the War Powers Act were not wrong about the need for Congress to play a role in collective decision making about war and peace. Congress can’t stop a president from ordering missile strikes, but it can influence the course and scope of a military operation, and affect its popularity among voters. And ultimately Congress has one powerful weapon in facing off against a president: the power of the purse.
Congress can be blamed for unintentionally authorizing a major war in Vietnam through the Tonkin Gulf Resolution of 1964. But as Princeton historian Julian Zelizer wrote, “compared to Congress during the presidency of George W. Bush, the Vietnam-era legislature compiled an impressive record in challenging flawed presidential decisions. Between 1964 and 1975, many legislators forced discussion of difficult questions about the mission, publicly challenged the administration's core arguments, and used budgetary mechanisms to create pressure on the Pentagon to bring the war to a halt.”
When Nixon’s administration was negotiating with the government of North Vietnam to end the war, Zelizer noted, “the president knew that he only had a limited amount of time before Congress finally used the power of the purse to bring the war to an end -- regardless of what the administration wanted.”
Five months before passing the War Powers Act, the Senate voted overwhelmingly to cut off funds for the war, and the House followed suit.
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