174 Presidential politics
to supervise the unitary executive branch and as Commander in Chief
and consistent with the constitutional limitations on the judicial power,
which will assist in achieving the shared objective of the Congress and
the President... of protecting the American people from further terror-
ist attacks.In other words the President was saying that he would interpret the Act in the
way that suited him. Bush also evaded the terms of the Foreign Intelligence
Surveillance Act of 1978, when in response to the attacks of 11 September
2001 he authorised the National Security Agency ‘to intercept international
communications in to or out of the United States of persons linked to al-
Qaeda or an affiliated terrorist organization’. The Attorney General, in 2006,
justified such wiretappings without the authorisation of a warrant. ‘Among
the President’s most basic constitutional duties is the duty to protect the Na-
tion from armed attack. The Constitution gives him all necessary authority
to fulfill that responsibility’.
These, then, are ways in which the president’s potential power is de-
pendent upon the extent of existing authority to act, and upon the basis of
that authority. But this is not the only dimension. The problem of finance
must be considered. An existing authority, statutory or constitutional, is of
little significance if the money to implement it is not forthcoming. Some
statutory powers can be exercised with little or no expenditure of money,
whereas others require large appropriations by Congress before they can be
implemented. Congress keeps quite distinct the two operations of authorising
a programme and appropriating money for it. It is by no means unknown for
it to do the former and to balk at the latter. Furthermore, Congress insists
upon the annual appropriation of funds, although the authority to pursue
a particular policy may have been on the statute book for many years, so
that the administration must continually justify its demands and persuade
Congress to give it the money it needs. Thus the use of federal troops or of
the National Guard to maintain order is a very different financial proposition
from running an anti-poverty programme, even though the latter has been
fully approved by Congress. Similarly, the decision to implement the Voting
Rights Act with greater vigour may initially involve only a redeployment of
the resources of the Department of Justice, but in the long run it will depend
upon congressional willingness to maintain a large force of attorneys and
federal marshals.
The third dimension of presidential power is the arena in which action is
contemplated. The general considerations set out above about the character
of the sources of power, and the financial implications of policy decisions,
apply to the fields of domestic and foreign policy alike, and also to the prob-
lems of the military sector. Thus the foreign aid programme is one where
congressional control is felt very strongly, because of the need both for statu-
tory authorisation and for the annual appropriation of large sums of money.