Things being as they are – and when aren’t they? – I won’t have time or energy for a fresh piece today, so I’d like to invite my Gentle Readers’ attention to three older pieces:
- What Are National Defense and National Security?
- What’s The Exchange Rate?
- A Failure To Understand, Or An Outright Deceit?
…plus the snippet below, from Garet Garrett’s essay “Rise of Empire:”
To outsmart the Constitution and to circumvent its restraints became a popular exercise of the art of government in the Roosevelt regime. In defense of his attempt to pack the Supreme Court with social-minded judges after several of his New Deal laws had been declared unconstitutional, President Roosevelt wrote:"The reactionary members of the Court had apparently determined to remain on the bench for as long as life continued—for the sole purpose of blocking any program of reform."Among the millions who at the time applauded that statement of contempt there were very few, if there was indeed one, who would not have been frightened by a revelation of the logical sequel. They believed, as everyone else did, that there was one thing a President could never do. There was one sentence of the Constitution that could not fall, so long as the Republic lived.
The Constitution says: "The Congress shall have power to declare war."
That, therefore, was the one thing no President could do. By his own will he could not declare war. Only Congress could declare war, and Congress could be trusted never to do it but by will of the people. And that was the innermost safeguard of the republic. The decision whether or not to go to war was in the hands of the people—or so they believed. No man could make it for them.
It is true that President Roosevelt got the country into World War II. That is not the same thing. For a declaration of war he went to Congress—after the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor. He wanted it, he had planned it, and yet the Constitution forbade him to declare war and he durst not do it.
Nine years later a much weaker President did.
See you tomorrow, I hope.
I should have liked the President to have gone to the Congress in mid February to ask for a formal declaration of war vs the IRGC of Iran. An exhaustive recitation of every lethal attack these maniacs have made since 1979 against us and ours. I think it would have put the Dems in a spot. And a formal declaration? Opens up prosecution for treason for those who obstruct the war effort.
ReplyDeleteAll that being said, we have in the past taken military action without a D of W. In 1916 Wilson sent Pershing into Mexico after poncho Villa. We INVADED Mexico!