Depend upon it.
On Wednesday, President Obama will pulverize the U.S. Constitution by unilaterally declaring indefinite uncircumscribed warfare against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).
He will seize the exclusive constitutional power of Congress to authorize war, and Congress will effetely surrender without a battle.
Mr. Obama will sermonize that he was elected to make the American people “safe.” But he will be unable to cite a single syllable in the Constitution or its history to substantiate that fabrication.
The Constitution is explicit in Article II, Section 1, Clause 8. The president is elected to “preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States.” And Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 entrusts solely to Congress the power “to declare War. The meaning of that clause is not open to doubt.
President George Washington, who presided at the constitutional convention, lectured: “The constitution vests the power of declaring war in Congress; therefore no offensive expedition of importance can be undertaken until after they shall have deliberated upon the subject and authorized such a measure.”
James Madison, father of the Constitution, explained in a letter to Thomas Jefferson: “The Constitution supposes what history demonstrates, that the Executive is the branch most prone to war and most interested in it, therefore the Constitution has with studied care vested that power in the Legislature.”
Indeed, every participant in the drafting and ratification of the Constitution understood that only Congress was authorized to cross the Rubicon from peace to war. The president, in contrast to British kings, would be powerless on that score, as Alexander Hamilton underscored in Federalist 69: “The President is to be commander-in-chief of the army and navy of the United States. In this respect his authority would be nominally the same with that of the king of Great Britain, but in substance much inferior to it. It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies — all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.”
The Constitution discourages war because it is the enemy of liberty, property and limited government at home. In times of war, the law is silent.The executive is crowned with limitless power to kill or detain. The surveillance state metastasizes, while the right to be let alone is crushed. Secrecy trumps transparency, which invites government folly and abuses. Government by consent of the governed bows to unilateral executive action.
In sum, Mr. Obama will be violating his constitutional oath and members of Congress will have abdicated their constitutional responsibilities if the president is permitted to employ the military in hopes of destroying ISIS by military force without prior express authorization from Congress. No American soldier should be directed by the resident to risk that last full measure of devotion unless Congress is convinced that the game is worth the gamble.
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