Later this year, President Obama tells us, the war in Afghanistan—the longest in our nation’s history—will finally be over. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq over the last thirteen13 years have generated a veritable cottage industry of scholarship from legal experts, philosophers, and political scientists deploring (or, in some cases, defending) a system of government that has allowed recent presidents to lead the country headlong into war while Congress watches from the sidelines. According to most scholars, this arrangement stands in stark contrast to an earlier period in American history, about which Louis Fisher has remarked: “From 1789 to 1950, lawmakers, the courts, and the executive branch understood that only Congress could initiate offensive actions against other nations” (“Applying the War Powers Resolutions to the War on Terrorism,” U.S. Senate Subcommittee on the Constitution, Federalism, and Property Rights, 2002: 13.)

Brien Hallett’s Declaring War offers a more radical perspective, arguing that Congress has never properly fulfilled its constitutional responsibility to declare war. Instead, Hallett argues, Congress has been subservient to the president’s wishes whenever war is on the horizon. Focusing in particular on two nineteenth-century wars, the War of 1812 and the Spanish-American War, he writes that Congress’s ability to declare war is hamstrung by the nature of its organization and the reelection imperative. Thus, war declarations do not result from the deliberations of an independent legislative branch, but instead depend upon the exercise of presidential leadership. Reflecting upon this state of affairs, Hallett argues that Congress should not have the ability to declare war, and proposes several constitutional and congressional reforms that he suggests would ensure a proper balance between Congress and the president.

The first chapter argues that wars make presidents into tyrants, and that the Founders’ misguided attempts to share war powers across the branches of government has instead enabled tyranny to flourish “under the cloak of national security and defense” (p. 2). In contrast to Edward Corwin, Clinton Rossiter, Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., and other scholars who have argued that through war presidents have expanded their reach, Hallett argues that the “tyranny” that takes hold during war is due not to overzealous presidents but, rather, to Congress’s failure to uphold its “constitutional bargain during war” (p. 4). But like Schlesinger, Hallett argues that presidential excess recedes once wars end, as “[p]residents have so far relinquished their extraordinarily power when peace resumed” (p. 6). Thus, in pointing out how war provides cover for “constitutional dictatorship,” he argues that we should focus on three facets of war-making powers: the power to decide whether to go to war, the power to declare war, and the power to command the war forces.

The bulk of the book’s analysis is found in Chapters 2–4. In Chapter 2, Hallett uses the War of 1812 to show how the president’s ability to decide whether to go to war effectively strips away Congress’s ability to play an independent role in taking the nation to war. The War of 1812, as the nation’s first, established precedents concerning how the nation was to go to war. Young war hawks in Congress, led by newly elected Speaker Henry Clay, collaborated with the Madison administration to plan legislative strategy surrounding the adoption of a declaration of war against Great Britain. In doing so, Clay and the war hawks “violated the distinction that separates war from peace, assimilating the Congress’s wartime duty to its peacetime procedures” by “severing the decision [to go to war] from the declaration [of war]” (p. 24). Thus, Hallett concludes, “the declaration of 1812 established the necessary dictatorial precedents for overcoming the incompetence and incapacity of the U.S. Congress ‘to declare war’” (p. 41).

Chapter 3 more fully explicates these incompetencies and incapacities in the context of the Spanish-American War. President William McKinley opposed war with Spain, while the 55th Congress vehemently desired conflict. This presented Congress with the opportunity to compose a declaration of war that communicated its true preferences as to whether and how the United States should go to war with Spain. And so they did. However, as Hallett tells it, the process was largely hijacked by partisan and electoral motivations—the stuff of ordinary legislative politics. In the case of the Spanish-American War, therefore, even though the process most closely resembled that which the author believes was the intent of the Founders, “the great game of politics” (p. 65) that characterized congressional deliberations shows that even if Congress is capable of declaring war, it should not have the power to do so. In Chapter 4, he argues that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 codified the president’s ability to ignore Congress when taking the country to war; thus, the Founders failed to anticipate that war-making powers would not be shared at all across the branches, but instead rest almost entirely with the president. The remainder of the book describes the functions of a war declaration (Chapter 5), uses speech-act theory to characterize whether declarations of war are consistent with the rule of law (Chapter 6), reviews the ways in which war is declared (Chapter 7), and then proposes possible solutions to what the author sees as the constitutional failings (Chapters 8–10) before concluding (Chapter 11).

While one may agree with some of Hallett’s empirical conclusions about the balance of power between Congress and the president when it comes to deciding questions of war and peace, his book is less successful at explaining how this state of affairs came to pass. For instance, in attempting to explain which features of Congress led its members to cede its war-making powers to the president, he variously cites asymmetries of information between Congress and the executive branch (p. 18), the bicameral nature of Congress (pp. 50–51), legislators’ electoral incentives (p. 66), partisan competition within the chamber and between the branches (pp. 70–71), and the rise of the select and standing committee systems (p.186). This lack of focus makes it difficult to persuasively identify potential correctives. Moreover, throughout the book Hallett holds up the Second Continental Congress (1776) as an example of a the way in which a legislative body should decide the question of war and then go about declaring it. He points out that the U.S. Congress, with its elected members and bicameral legislature, is no Second Continental Congress; but, critically, he fails to mention that there was no executive operating alongside the Second Continental Congress. It is no stretch to imagine that even the appointed members of the unicameral Continental Congress would have perceived their incentives differently had their war-making powers been shared with an independent executive.

Finally, Declaring War addresses many features of the American system of government that are of considerable interest to scholars of political institutions and American politics, but yet Hallett fails to meaningfully engage this rich body of scholarship. For instance, in discussing how the early Congresses reduced their reliance on the Committee of the Whole in favor of the committee system, he makes the curious claim that the “standing/select committee system deprived the members of the needed expertise to draft, debate, and vote on fully reasoned declarations of war” (p. 193). Similarly, he argues that asymmetries of information between the president and members of Congress tip the balance on war-related issues in the president’s favor; however, as numerous scholars have written, such asymmetries are common features of relations between presidents and Congress. If we believe these conclusions, should we also believe that presidents are more dictatorial than even Hallett allows? Finally, if Congress had fulfilled its constitutional obligations as articulated by the author, would we have observed differences in war-related outcomes? Would a more empowered Congress put the brakes on an inherently hawkish president, or would we find that Congress houses the true warmongers? Hallett does not say, though it provides an interesting historical counterfactual.