End the Imperial Presidency
Stephen Wertheim, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
These wars go on in part because one person wages them. Congress has abdicated its constitutional duty to determine whether, where and whom America should fight.
Mr. Biden inherited this situation, but he need not perpetuate either the ongoing wars or the legal evasions that enable them. He could tell Congress this: It has six months to issue a formal declaration of the wars it wants to continue, or else the troops (and planes and drones) are coming home.
Amen. A-fucking-men.
Were he to deliver such an ultimatum, Mr. Biden would, in a stroke, usher in a new [actually, old. As old as the Constitution.] era of U.S. foreign policy. Of course, the president would be attacked for shirking his responsibility. But the responsibility to declare war rightly belongs to Congress, and if Congress keeps passing the buck, then Mr. Biden, his successor or the voting public ought to insist that it fulfill its obligations. Otherwise, a lone individual will continue to direct the largest military the world has ever seen...
If this idea sounds revolutionary, the real revolution came when Congress stopped declaring war altogether. For the Framers, the clause giving Congress the power to “declare war” ranked among the Constitution’s key innovations. James Madison considered it the wisest part of the document, because he thought the executive was “the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it.”
...
In the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor, Congress declared war. It has never done so again...Setting out to police the world, presidents circumvented the congressional constraints once erected to stand in their way...the purposeful submission of Congress to the imperial presidency.
...
Congress needs to adopt new standards, building on old ones. Back when Congress formally declared war, as it has done 11 times in history, it named the countries against which it was initiating hostilities. That practice was valuable because it left the United States at peace with the rest of the world; Congress would have to issue another declaration to expand those wars to new adversaries.
...
This summer, an unlikely trio of Senators advanced a similar proposal. Introduced by Chris Murphy, a Democrat; Mike Lee, a Republican; and Bernie Sanders, an Independent, the National Security Powers Act would tightly define new interventions, sunset authorizations after two years and automatically defund unlawful campaigns.
I lined out that portion because that is stepping on the chief executive's role of commander in chief. Why must people take a good idea too far? By the Constitution, the Congress declares, the president wages.
...
...the political system that must act to make Congress do its job — by refusing to conduct wars that Congress won’t declare, or by punishing representatives who won’t hold essential votes.
