Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War

[babylonsister]

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/07/23/opinion/23mon4.html

Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War

By ADAM COHEN
Published: July 23, 2007

The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.”

The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”

The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”

snip//

The Constitution cannot enforce itself. It is, as the constitutional scholar Edwin Corwin famously observed, an “invitation to struggle” among the branches, but the founders wisely bequeathed to Congress some powerful tools for engaging in the struggle. It is no surprise that the current debate over a deeply unpopular war is arising in the context of a Congressional spending bill. That is precisely what the founders intended.

Members of Congress should not be intimidated into thinking that they are overstepping their constitutional bounds. If the founders were looking on now, it is not Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi who would strike them as out of line, but George W. Bush, who would seem less like a president than a king.

[annabanana]

1. Confirming those weasly-answer Supremes beginning to look like a mistake?

Those parsing, lawyerly non-responses starting to look like lies to any of those dry powderpuffers yet?

[Demeter]

3. We WILL Clean Out the Supreme Court, Too

or we will cease to exist as a free nation. It has to happen, and it will. This I believe, but I don't know when. I hope it's soon, because people are dying of the injustices perpetrated against them.

[Demeter]

2. They are ALL Out of Line: Bush Pelosi, Cheney and Reid

We have damn few patriots out there: Conyers, Waxman, Leahy, and their supporters; fighting an uphill battle against enormous forces.

[datasuspect]

5. they're all in cahoots

someone is getting paid off somewhere.


remember, these are ALL well-connected people with wealth.

they are essentially on the same team regardless of the letter after their name.

[Golden Raisin]

7. Or in some cases blackmailed.

[Solly Mack]

4. I guess it does no good to say

that people have been warned since before the Selection about George Bush and Dick Cheney

Told you so is cold comfort

[leftchick]

6. James was prescient!

If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land, it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy.
James Madison