RaleighDevil
Well-known member
Stephen L. Carter, professor of Law at Yale, points out that presidents have long ignored the admonition that they must deal with Congress when it comes to engaging in warlike activity.
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-07/trump-doesn-t-need-congress-to-strike-in-syria
Let’s start with the obvious: Every U.S. president, all the way back to the founding, has at some point used military force without first obtaining the approval of the legislative branch. A few snippets: George Washington fought the so-called Northwest Indian War to subdue the native people of Ohio. James Monroe sent forces to conquer Amelia Island, off Florida. James Buchanan sent Marines to halt the civil war in Nicaragua. In 1893, U.S. forces overthrew the government of Hawaii, although apparently without White House permission. Still, the overthrow stuck. On the eve of World War I, Woodrow Wilson ordered the Marines into Mexico. Half a century later Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. Most prominently, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John Kennedy took the nation to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
More recent history is much the same. In 2011, the White House justified President Barack Obama’s orders to attack Libya with the remarkable argument that because U.S. forces were conducting only bombing and using missiles, the actions did not constitute “hostilities” within the meaning of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 -- a statute requiring that hostilities end within 90 days if no congressional approval is forthcoming.
True, presidents often claim to find justification for their wars in the language of existing statutes and resolutions. President Obama relied regularly on the Authorization for Use of Military Force adopted by the Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That resolution is now more than a decade and a half old, but I have no doubt that the Trump White House will soon be citing it as legal authority.
But what about the congressional power to declare war? Scholars nowadays are sharply divided over whether the Framers intended it as a check on the executive’s “independent” warmaking authority. Certainly at the time of the founding, the use of a formal declaration of war had fallen into desuetude. Yes, there is a reasonable case to be made that the Framers did indeed hope to restrict presidential use of the military without congressional assent. (That’s one reason for the early resistance to a standing army.) But the new nation did not behave as though a declaration was necessary. (Abraham Lincoln’s famous aphorism that the country should never go to war through the will of one man was a response to President James Polk’s invasion of Mexico somewhat in advance of congressional permission.)
https://www.bloomberg.com/view/articles/2017-04-07/trump-doesn-t-need-congress-to-strike-in-syria
Let’s start with the obvious: Every U.S. president, all the way back to the founding, has at some point used military force without first obtaining the approval of the legislative branch. A few snippets: George Washington fought the so-called Northwest Indian War to subdue the native people of Ohio. James Monroe sent forces to conquer Amelia Island, off Florida. James Buchanan sent Marines to halt the civil war in Nicaragua. In 1893, U.S. forces overthrew the government of Hawaii, although apparently without White House permission. Still, the overthrow stuck. On the eve of World War I, Woodrow Wilson ordered the Marines into Mexico. Half a century later Ronald Reagan invaded Grenada. Most prominently, in the Cuban Missile Crisis, President John Kennedy took the nation to the brink of nuclear war with the Soviet Union.
More recent history is much the same. In 2011, the White House justified President Barack Obama’s orders to attack Libya with the remarkable argument that because U.S. forces were conducting only bombing and using missiles, the actions did not constitute “hostilities” within the meaning of the War Powers Resolution of 1973 -- a statute requiring that hostilities end within 90 days if no congressional approval is forthcoming.
True, presidents often claim to find justification for their wars in the language of existing statutes and resolutions. President Obama relied regularly on the Authorization for Use of Military Force adopted by the Congress after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks. That resolution is now more than a decade and a half old, but I have no doubt that the Trump White House will soon be citing it as legal authority.
But what about the congressional power to declare war? Scholars nowadays are sharply divided over whether the Framers intended it as a check on the executive’s “independent” warmaking authority. Certainly at the time of the founding, the use of a formal declaration of war had fallen into desuetude. Yes, there is a reasonable case to be made that the Framers did indeed hope to restrict presidential use of the military without congressional assent. (That’s one reason for the early resistance to a standing army.) But the new nation did not behave as though a declaration was necessary. (Abraham Lincoln’s famous aphorism that the country should never go to war through the will of one man was a response to President James Polk’s invasion of Mexico somewhat in advance of congressional permission.)
