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The sweeping national security speech that President Obama delivered at the National Archives earlier this month offered Congress a challenge in the form of an invitation.

On several contentious issues, Obama invited legislators to play an expanded role in devising the legal strategy for confronting terrorism -- an approach that renounced President George W. Bush's attempt to keep authority over those decisions within the executive branch. The challenge implicit in Obama's invitation is that Congress must responsibly share the political risks inherent in balancing liberty and security during the age of global terror. On that, the jury remains out.

Obama so far has pursued a characteristically nuanced attempt to recalibrate Bush's anti-terrorism strategy. On some questions -- for example, closing the prison at Guantanamo Bay and banning "enhanced interrogation techniques" -- Obama is either repudiating Bush's decisions or accelerating Bush's second-term transition away from hard-line tactics. In other areas, such as retaining the possibility of indefinite detention for some people who have never been tried, Obama is proposing more continuity than his supporters expected.

Yet in his speech, Obama unequivocally broke from Bush in a manner that will color all of these decisions. Most striking about Obama's address was his repeated insistence that Congress and the courts must be more involved in shaping these policies. Obama said he will work with Congress to devise plans for closing Guantanamo and reforming the military commission system that Bush established to try some detainees. Obama said he wants to give Congress and the courts more authority to review his decisions on releasing security-related information and that he plans to provide Congress annual reports about his administration's attempts to withhold information in court through the state secrets privilege. Most tellingly, Obama said that if indefinite detention is necessary for some terrorism suspects who his administration decides cannot plausibly be tried, his decisions must be subject to congressional and judicial review because in "our constitutional system, prolonged detention should not be the decision of any one man."

Obama's invitation shows he understands the need to ground security policies in consensus.

On all of these issues, "the difference from the previous administration could not be more dramatic," says New York University Law School professor Richard Pildes. Bush pursued his legal strategy for combating terrorism primarily through unilateral executive action. And he usually involved Congress only if he had no choice, as when the Supreme Court in 2006 invalidated his military commission plan.

Bush's approach proved shortsighted because it failed to attract the diverse support necessary to armor his policies against judicial and political challenges. Throughout American history, as Pildes notes, the courts have proven most willing to accept wartime federal encroachments on liberty precisely when Congress has endorsed them -- and most resistant to such expansions when they are unilaterally imposed by the president, as Bush's military commissions were. "It's a consistent pattern in American constitutional history," Pildes says.

Jack Goldsmith, who ran the Justice Department's Office of Legal Counsel under Bush, recently wrote in The New Republic that great wartime presidents, such as Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt, recognized and responded to public unease about unfettered presidential wartime power by sharing responsibility with Congress. Each man, he noted, understood "the vital ongoing need to convince the citizenry that the president is using his extraordinary war powers for the public good and not for personal or institutional aggrandizement." Bush, by choosing so often to "act unilaterally," Goldsmith concluded, "failed to grasp" that insight, despite some second-term concessions to it.

Obama's invitation to greater congressional participation shows his greater understanding of the need to ground security policies in broad consensus. But his approach asks more of Capitol Hill. For years, Bush's unilateralism allowed legislators to dodge hard calls on terrorism. Now, "if Congress is a partner, Congress shares responsibility," says Rep. Jane Harman, D-Calif., a leader on intelligence issues.

The panicky votes this month against giving Obama the money to begin closing Guantanamo, as many legislators have long demanded, didn't inspire much confidence about Congress's meeting that standard. Neither does the growing tendency of congressional Republicans to equate any deviation from Bush's approach as surrender to Al Qaeda. In that contentious environment, Harman is surely right when she says that resolving tough issues, such as closing Guantanamo, "is not a 10-minute project." But, sooner or later, Congress must leave its handprints in the concrete if Obama is to build a more durable legal foundation for combating terror.