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New War Powers Plan Skirts the Constitution’s Clear Wording
John F. McManus
JBS
Friday, July 11, 2008
Two former secretaries of state spent the past year
concocting a new plan to give the president a role in war-making
that the Constitution does not allow.
As the Vietnam War was winding down, Congress passed the 1973
War Powers Act over President Nixon’s veto. This highly
questionable measure set guidelines for any president’s
future use of the nation’s armed forces in the absence of
a declaration of war by Congress. In effect, it gave the president
power never awarded by the Constitution. Never tested by the Supreme
Court, the Act has sat unused, is criticized from all sides, and
is today considered null.
For the past year, former secretaries of state James A. Baker
III and Warren Christopher have chaired the bipartisan National
War Powers Commission seeking to replace the 1973 Act. On July
8, they unveiled their proposal while claiming that the Constitution
“ambiguously divides war powers” between the president
and Congress.
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No it does not! Congress is given sole authority to send the
nation to war; the role of the president is to guide the military
once war has begun. There is no division of the war-making authority;
all of it resides in Congress. Baker and Christopher want Congress
to enact a new “War Powers Consultation Act” that
will establish rules for “consultation” between the
president and Congress before sending the nation into war.
As might be expected of two prominent leaders of the Council
on Foreign Relations, an overly influential "think tank"
that consistently favors internationalism and legal innovation
over national sovereignty and the Constitution, these two sidestepped
the Constitution’s clear delegation of power to Congress
alone to “declare war.” A president may request such
a declaration as Franklin Roosevelt did immediately after the
attack at Pearl Harbor. But no president has a formal role in
making such a momentous decision. Once war is declared, he is
the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, and that’s grave
responsibility enough.
In October 2002, six months before the invasion of Iraq and the
start of the ongoing struggle, Congressman Ron Paul offered a
motion to declare war against Iraq during a session of the House
International Relations Committee. He announced that he intended
to vote against his motion because he didn’t believe such
a war was either necessary or desirable. He was promptly told
by the committee’s chairman (the late Henry Hyde) that his
reference to the Constitution’s sole grant of war-making
authority to Congress was “an anachronism,” no longer
worthy of consideration. Credit Mr. Hyde with accurately and flippantly
reflecting the prevailing view.
There has been no congressional declaration of war since 1941.
No declaration of war sent troops to fight and die in Korea, Vietnam,
the Balkans, the first Iraq War, and the current wars in Iraq
and Afghanistan. To launch each of these undeclared conflicts,
presidents have cited weaselly-worded congressional resolutions
and then relied on “authorization” supplied by the
UN Security Council to proceed. How far we have strayed from the
Constitution!
It is hardly surprising that, in the absence of such a clearly
stated requirement, none of the wars since WW II has been won.
A declaration of war establishes a goal for the forces it sends
into battle. Without one, the goal can be altered. The current
Iraq War has seen its goal change from barring Iraqi use of weapons
of mass destruction, to removing Saddam Hussein from power, to
nation building, to warring against terrorism, and now to spreading
“democracy.”
All should consider the cogent warning given by Abraham Lincoln
more than a decade before he became president. He wrote in a letter
to a law colleague: “Kings had always been involving and
impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally if not
always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our
Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly
oppressions; and they resolved so to frame the Constitution that
no one man should hold the power of bringing the oppression upon
us.”
The proposal now offered by Baker and Christopher ignores the
clear wording of the Constitution. Congress alone was given power
to declare war. These two men and their commission want imperial
power given to the office of president, the kind Abraham Lincoln
and the framers of the Constitution opposed. The office of president
was created mainly to execute laws passed by Congress, not to
make law and certainly not to make war.
When given the chance to do so, Congress should reject the Baker-Christopher
War Powers Consultation Act. No more war without the Constitution’s
requirement for a formal declaration by Congress!
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INFOWARS:
BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND
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