April 17, 2026

The Constitution’s Forgotten Term Limit on Military Power

By: Mark Nevitt and Matthew. B. Lawrence

This article was originally published on Just Security.

Somewhere in the basement of American constitutional law sits a forgotten clause that the Framers considered indispensable, Alexander Hamilton defended at length in The Federalist Papers, and virtually every constitutional law professor has stopped teaching. Article I, Section 8, Clause 12 — the “Armies Clause” or “Two-Year Clause” — provides that no appropriation of money to “raise and support Armies” shall be “for a longer Term than two Years.” It is, in the Framers’ conception, the military’s term limit: a structural guarantee that no single Congress could permanently fund a standing army, and that every House and every Senate would retain the power to influence the conduct and composition of any federal army by controlling its funding.

They designed the Two-Year Clause not as a technical appropriations rule but as a structural guarantee: that the army of the United States would remain, as one Federalist put it, “the army of the people.”

That guarantee, enshrined in the Constitution’s text, is now largely theoretical due to an obscure 1904 Solicitor General opinion that has proven to be a footnote to history — until now. The Framers’ fears are being realized: troops are being deployed in American cities, Congress has not cast a vote on the Iran War authorization, and President Trump signed into law a four-year military and ICE funding package buried in the One Big Beautiful Bill Act (OBBA) that insulates militarized immigration enforcement from congressional control. In a forthcoming article in the George Washington Law Review, we argue that it is time for all this to change; it is time to remember and revitalize the Two-Year Clause. Here’s why.

Read the full article on Just Security.

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