Article 1, Section 8 of the US Constitution says (among other laundry list of things) “Congress shall have the right to raise and support Armies, but no Appropriation of Money to that Use shall be for a longer Term than two Years.”
Two years??? …So, how did we get to where we are today? 
How do you read that to mean that Congress can’t pass a new appropriations bill every year (or two)?
My guess is that the funding for the army is renewed with every budget. The two year limit is probably as archaic as issuing letters of marque and would probably only be an issue under a bizarre circumstance like America electing a House of Representatives who want to disband the army completely so the outgoing Congress funds it for 4 more years (i.e. it’ll never happen)
Kunilou, very true… but then, surely our forefathers thought of that, so why even bother to establish a limit in the US Constitution???
I don’t think its archaic. One could imagine the outgoing GOP Congress in '06 passing a bill funding the war in Iraq indefinitely into the future, to keep the incoming Dem Congress from cutting the purse strings. The Constitution prevents this, since the funding has to be renewed for every new Congress.
At the time, armies were not the huge, incredibly complex, and insanely complicated organizations they are today. People could, and did, raise armies with private fortunes, and countries’ relative level of armed strength would ebb and flow as needed (in fact, at the beginning of the War of 1812, the USA effectively had no professional army of any significance at all.)
The idea of a national armed forces as you understand it now is a relatively new phenomenon that really started with the French Revolution and didn’t become really popular - or technologically and logistically possible for most nations - until into the 19th century. You could raise an army of 10,000 men in a few months by offering men little more than a few gold coins for their drinking and meat to eat every day, and if you did and could afford muskets and a few professional officers, you’d have the biggest and baddest army for a hundred miles around.
So the framers of the U.S. Constitution were living in a world where it would still have been pretty fresh history - hell, current events - to see monarchs, dukes, and various other plenipotentiaries raise private armies, or control armies through the force of wealth that did not precisely and totally answer to national authority. The purpose of that part of the Constitution was thus to prevent a rogue Congress from allowing an uncontrollable army, that might fall under the sway of someone not wholly devoted to the principles the framers were trying to protect, to be raised.
That sort of thing generally cannot happen now, because armies are just too big and too expensive for private hands. To give you some idea of scale, Canada’s armed forces, which is professional but not very big, costs about twenty billion dollars a year just in operating costs, so we’re not even talking about the initial cost of building all its bases or the decades of work that have gone into creating the existing organization and talent level. There is no private individual in the world who could build and maintain such a force; even Bill Gates would be stone broke long before he had anything that could fight anything else.
By comparison, Bonnie Prince Charlie, in the mid-18th century - not long before the American Revolution - raised enough money on his own to finance an army big enough to conquer most of Scotland and give the English a pretty good scare. Try to imagine an individual doing that today in a modern country. It’s ludicrous.
Even the infamous Xe/Blackwater firm is a tiny little ant as compared to any modern country’s armed forces and in any case relies on a constant stream of government funding to be as large as it is.
Essentially it’s one of the many things about the constitution we’ve “modernized” by ignoring. The intent of the founders was so that we did not have a standing professional army at all, but could form one when necesity dictated. Obviously that wouldn’t work in a modern context, but rather than amend the constitution, we just ignore it wholesale and invent some modern line of thinking that superficially justifies that our actions are congruent with the constitution (ie we fund it every year, therefore it passes the 2 year test, or we have the interstate commerce clause, therefore more or less every limitation on congress’ power in article 1 section 8 is void, etc).
Hasn’t there been a standing US army since the early 1800s? If the founders were the first ones to establish the standing professional army it’s something of a stretch to say we’ve modernized outside their intents.
I think some of you give “the Founding Fathers” too much respect for their deeds. As Adam Smith said,
We don’t ignore this clause at all. We have a standing army–and nothing in the clause says we can’t–but we continue to apporpriate money for it every year. (Not even every two years!)
The two-year clause is a reaction to a very specific event in British history–the demand of King James II that Parliament vote him revenues for life, so that he could build up a standing army answerable to him and not to Parliament. This was one of the incidents that provoked the Glorious Revolution and led to the British Bill of Rights, on which so many American constitutional provisions are modeled.
The two-year clause prevents Congress from honoring a similar demand from an American President.
You may be right. I may be misinterpreting the section in light of various quotes from founders about the dangers of a standing army.
Here’s a fuller explanation of the the provision from the Annotated Constitution:
So, yes, the provision was inspired by the fear of standing armies, but the provision doesn’t prohibit standing armies. It limits the availability of funds to support armies, and the government still complies with that.
The basic idea is that Congress controls the military by controlling its financial support. Anytime it wants to stop a war it just has to shut off the cash.
That’s true of all Congressional appropriations, but only the military has the two-year restriction. Congress is free to make long-term appropriations for other purposes.
Art. I, Sec. 9, cl. 7 also provides:
“No Money shall be drawn from the Treasury, but in Consequence of Appropriations made by Law; and a regular Statement and Account of Receipts and Expenditures of all public Money shall be published from time to time.”
But the Intelligence Community’s budget is classified. There was a lawsuit in the late Seventies, IIRC, seeking to force disclosure of that “public money,” and the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed it due to the plaintiff’s lack of standing (just being a U.S. citizen or a taxpayer was held to be insufficient). Apparently no one has standing to enforce a basic provision of the Constitution.
Plus, the President publishes an accounting of receipts and expenditures every year when his budget comes out.
But in this hypothetical couldn’t the incoming Dem Congress simply repeal the law passed by the outgoing GOP Congress?
In our system, as you know, there a multiple roadblocks that proposed legislation has to pass (the House, the Senate, the Executive and the Court system).
So, let’s remove this clause from the Consitution for a moment. Here’s a possible scenario:
Congress and the Executive are dominated by the War4Ever party and pass legislation for indefinite appropriations for the military. Then, there’s an election. The House is now dominated by the Peace4Ever party, but the Senate and the Executive remain the same. Under this scenario, the appropriation continues, because any removal of the appropriation passed by the House doesn’t get passed by the Senate (or signed by the Executive).
The clause, then, prevents that scenario. With the clause in place, once the Peace4Ever party wins control of the House, they simply refuse to sign onto a new appropriations bill, and the funding fails.
In our modern political alignment, this scenario is unlikely, since nobody is going to cut off appropriations of the military. But that is a political calculation. With the clause in place, the status quo bias shifts away from indefinite appropriations for the military.
Not unless they can defeat a Presidential Veto.
It’s more interesting when you read both Clause 12 & 13 together regarding the military:
The explicit difference between having a standing Army (no no) and standing Navy (a-ok). One has the 2 year limitation, the other does not. I always thought this was due to the fear of having a standing Army as mentioned above.