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The Power to Declare War — Who Speaks for the Constitution? Part 1
by Doug Bandow, June 1995
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
When presidents lose domestic support, they invariably look overseas for crises to solve. President Clinton is no different. After the Republicans swept Congress, he immediately flew off to the Pacific for a series of meetings with foreign leaders. Aides predict that he will continue to pay greater attention to foreign policy, where he is able to operate with fewer restrictions from a hostile Congress.
But foreign policy means more than just international summits. It also means war, as is evident from the Clinton administration's continuing attempt to push America, through the NATO alliance, into a larger role in the Balkans imbroglio. So far, President Bill Clinton has undertaken or considered military action in Bosnia, Haiti, Korea, and Somalia. At no point has he indicated a willingness to involve Congress in the decision-making process. To the contrary, in ...
The Power to Declare War — Who Speaks for the Constitution? Part 3
by Doug Bandow, August 1995
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3
The favorite justification for presidents unilaterally wandering off to war around the globe seems to be: everyone else does it. Proponents of executive war-making contend that ample precedents — two hundred or more troop deployments without congressional approval — exist for the president to act without a congressional declaration. Yet, this list chiefly consists of, as constitutional scholar Edward Corwin put it, "fights with pirates, landings of small naval contingents on barbarous or semi-barbarous coasts, the dispatch of small bodies of troops to chase bandits or cattle rustlers across the Mexican border, and the like." These are dubious justifications for, say, ousting an existing government and occupying an entire nation. Anyway, et tu remains an unpersuasive reason to ignore the nation's fundamental law; the fact that past chief executives acted lawlessly does not empower the current ...