THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Thursday, February 23, 1995 TAG: 9502220018
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A10 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Editorial
LENGTH: Short : 49 lines
Internationalists and isolationists are dueling for the soul of the Republican Party. The lightning-rod issue is the National Security provisions of the Contract With America, but the dispute extends wider and deeper than that.
The Contract seeks to prevent U.S. troops from coming under foreign command, a goal few would question. But it also seeks to make it much more difficult for the United States to undertake peacekeeping missions, to participate in multinational U.N. endeavors and ultimately more difficult for the president to conduct foreign policy without submitting to micromanagement by Congress.
Critics suggest that the success of the GOP measures would gut the United Nations and would give Congress a veto over future presidential actions. It might also have made a variety of successful foreign-policy initiatives in the past - including Desert Storm - impossible to mount.
Republican strictures passed by the House and awaiting Senate action could force the United States to make a choice between two unattractive alternatives: Engage in overseas operations all alone or not at all. Yet sharing the expense, the risks and the moral high ground with allies has often been useful and even necessary in order to take a stand.
On this point and others, the Republican Revolution is about to collide with the genius of James Madison who devised a Constitution expressly to prevent the government from going to extremes.
A zealous House may want to change the way foreign policy is conducted, but a more deliberate Senate may have second thoughts, and the executive holds a veto in reserve.
Republicans in Congress would be wise to think twice before tying the hands of a Democratic president when it comes to conducting foreign affairs since the next president may be a Republican who will want a free hand to act. And a future Congress could be too craven or conflicted to approve an intervention that its members privately want the president to undertake.
There is almost universal agreement that the last congressional attempt to meddle with the president's ability to conduct foreign affairs - the War Powers Act - was intrusive, unworkable and wrongheaded. Yet, here comes a Republican Congress revving up to make another ill-considered power grab that could be an equally misguided constraint on future presidents. by CNB