The Springfield Republican
January 6, 1899
“Growth of the Imperator”
The contention very early advanced in the debate on imperialism that under the proposed system of empire the power and pretensions of the president would be largely increased at the expense of the constitutional powers of Congress, is already being demonstrated in actual practice. Senator Hoar, it seems, thinks so, too, for he said in his recent letter to the Boston merchants’ association:
We must enter with the nations of Europe, most of them monarchies, many of them despotisms, into the struggles and squabbles of diplomacy, struggling for our share of dismembered countries and plundered states—a contest which requires, if not artifice and deceit, which the American people loathe, at least secrecy and rapidity and concentrated power. The constitutional powers of the executive, of which our forefathers were so jealous, must be greatly enlarged. The constitutional powers of the Legislature, the representative of the people and of the states, must in a proportional degree be largely diminished.
The demonstration that the president is already encroaching upon other branches of the government in order to carry his imperialistic policy into effect is to be found in his instructions to his general at Manila, dated at the executive mansion in Washington on December 21, or two weeks before the president had even sent the treaty with Spain to the Senate. In that letter of instructions Mr. McKinley utterly ignored the co-ordinate and independent authority of the Senate as a part of the treaty-making power. Let every American who wishes the republic preserved read carefully the following passage in the Otis instructions:
With the signature of the treaty of peace between the United States and Spain by their respective plenipotentiaries at Paris on the 10th instant, and as the result of the victories of American arms, the future control, disposition and government of the Philippine islands are ceded to the United States. In fulfillment of the rights of sovereignty thus acquired, and the responsible obligations of government thus assumed, the actual occupation and administration of the entire group of the Philippine Islands becomes immediately necessary, and the military government heretofore maintained by the United States in the city, harbor and bay of Manila is to be extended with all possible dispatch to the whole of the ceded territory.
No human being can find in that letter of instructions the slightest recognition that the United States Senate has any voice in the transaction of this business. The president assumes that when he has once framed the treaty with Spain, the treaty thereby becomes a law of the land. The Senate he appears to consider of slight importance. And acting upon his unwarranted assumption of exclusive and autocratic power, he orders operations by his generals in extending American sovereignty by military force weeks before there is any prospect of his being lawfully invested by the constitutional process with the power to do the things he orders done. Is such usurpation possible! the reader exclaims. Read again the text of the passage referred to. “With the signature of the treaty of peace,” the president writes, the Philippine islands are ceded to the United States. “In fulfillment of the rights of sovereignty thus acquired,” “the actual occupation and administration of the entire group…become immediately necessary,” and the “military government…is to be extended with all possible dispatch to the whole of the ceded territory.” But how can that sovereignty be lawfully acquired under the treaty until the treaty becomes constitutionally a law of the land, and how can it become a law before the Senate has given its consent?
The president in acting upon such assumptions becomes an usurper of power that does not belong to him; he deals a wicked blow at Congress, and he begins the erection of a dangerous executive autocracy in the foreign relations of the republic. If he can ignore the constitutional rights of the Senate in this manner in order to fasten his grip upon distant territory, in defiance of the wishes of the inhabitants, he can at any time, under the plea of necessity, ignore the constitution entirely and set up any government he pleases in these United States. The Senate ought now, more than ever, to take issue with the president. Its constitutional prerogative is seriously threatened.
As for the people, they should take warning. Senator Hoar has merely pointed out what experience already confirms. Imperialists may smile and say that the criticism is “hysteria,” but the facts are that under imperialism there will be a dangerous concentration of power in the hands of the executive, making that official a grave menace to popular liberties when backed by the large standing army and the enormous financial power of trusts and monopolies bent on “capturing the markets of the world.”
M. Patrick Cullinane, Liberty and Anti-Imperialism, June 22, 2007.