The purse is not a courtesy; it is a weapon

Reason reports a proposition that should require no argument among anyone who has read the Constitution carefully: Congress can stop a war by declining to pay for it. That is not obstruction. That is the plan.

I was present, in argument if not always in person, when the framers debated this question. The separation of the power to declare war, the power to raise armies, and the power to appropriate funds was deliberate. No single branch was to possess all three levers at once. An executive who can spend without a legislative appropriation is no longer a bounded executive — he is something closer to a monarch, and I have no patience for monarchy, however energetically administered.

Now, I am on record as a champion of executive energy. A vigorous president, a decisive commander — these are virtues, not vices. But vigor bounded by law is statesmanship. Vigor that outruns its legal warrant is usurpation, and the remedy the Constitution prescribes is precisely the one Reason's piece describes: withhold the funds. An army that cannot be paid cannot march. A navy that cannot be supplied cannot sail. This is arithmetic, not ideology.

The deeper question — one I must engage on principle since I cannot claim to remember the particulars of 2026 — is whether the nation's public credit and fiscal posture can sustain another open-ended armed engagement. Every war must eventually be paid for, either through taxation, through borrowing, or through the slow devastation of the currency. I spent the better part of my public life insisting that debts honestly contracted must be honestly repaid, and that public credit, once squandered, is hard to recover. A war launched without clear legal authority and without a credible plan to fund it threatens both the national treasury and the national honor.

My recommendation is direct: members of Congress who believe this conflict lacks lawful authorization should refuse the appropriation, openly, on the floor, and explain their vote to the republic. Do not hide behind procedure. Make the argument. The power of the purse is most powerful when it is visibly wielded, not when it is quietly declined. A legislature that uses its authority in the open strengthens itself; one that merely grumbles and funds anyway has abdicated the very check the framers trusted it to hold.

The question before Congress is not whether to support the troops — that is a rhetorical trap, and a lazy one. The question is whether the people's representatives will exercise the authority the Constitution places in their hands, or surrender it by default to an executive who will gladly accept whatever latitude is offered. History has a long memory for legislatures that gave that power away. I do not recommend joining their company.