Editor’s note: Big Tent Ideas always aims to provide balancing perspectives on the hottest issues of the day. Below is a column from Brandan Buck, where he argues that Congress must reclaim its oversight powers over the president when it comes to warmaking authority. You can find a counterpoint here, where Paul Cella argues otherwise.

“Ambition must be made to counteract ambition,” counseled the author of the Federalist No. 51, arguing that competing centers of power were essential to checking the growth of tyranny. However, the biggest oversight on the part of the Founders was that Congress would not willfully surrender its own power, an abdication on full display with President Donald Trump’s war on Iran. To be sure, Trump’s launching of the war is merely the latest, although most profound episode in a long and enduring trend, the entrenching of war powers in the presidency and Congress’s willful abdication of its own prerogatives. Congress’s relinquishment of its duties has come at a high cost to the American people and widened the divide between the foreign policies that voters want and what they, in fact, receive.

The chief impetus for this transformation has been the nationalization of American politics and American elite attitudes on foreign affairs. Since the end of the........

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