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Congress, the President, and Public Policy. By Michael L. Mezey. Boulder: Westview, 1989. 255p. $42.00 cloth, $14.95 paper.

This political fact of constitutional life emerges in the analysis undertaken by Marc E. Smyrl of the War Powers Resolution of 1973, its political origins, its legislative history, its policy impacts, and its legal implications. This is a story told in the form of many stories: the rise of congressional codetermination in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, the congressional battle over the terms of the War Powers Resolution itself, a review of the instances when the War Powers Resolution was invoked—or not invoked—by an executive branch bent on involving U.S. military forces in circumstances of imminent or ongoing hostility, and finally a survey of congressional responses to these situations and their eventual consequences. Smyrl demonstrates that congressional capacity to constrain and censure the executive branch increases with cost, danger, and duration of conflict. But Smyrl also establishes that the history of U.S. military intervention abroad during the past two decades reveals a steady lowering of the casualty or danger threshold. Virtually with each passing crisis, congressional intrusion into the policymaking process has been provoked earlier, more dramatically, and at consistently lower levels of risk than had been true before. This lowered threshold of congressional involvement led to an attempt to renegotiate the terms of the War Powers Resolution ending in passage of the Multinational Force in Lebanon Resolution of 1983. Smyrl concludes that the War Powers and the Multinational Force in Lebanon Resolutions reflect a growing willingness on the part of the political branches to maintain a consultative framework that sustains open decisionmaking and national security.