Congress is doing its duty

You declare in your editorial "A heavy-laden war bill" (May 26) that "Congress has no business tying the hands of the nation's commander in chief during a time of war."

I beg your pardon?

The framers of the Constitution deliberately put funding the military in the hands of Congress as a control to keep one man — the president — from having too much power.

That's the whole point.

They were all too familiar with Britain's King George III, an absolute monarch, who had absolute power but without accountability, and they wanted none of it.

Whether one agrees or not with the president's conduct of the war in Iraq, the business of Congress is exactly that — to be a brake and a control on the executive. It's called "separation of powers."

Kenneth Payne

Spanish Fork