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Sunday, 16 March 2003
Declaring War ::
Senator Mark Dayton of Minnesota’s On The Senate Giving Up Its Constitutional Responsibility to Declare War:
18 months ago, the United States had the sympathy and the support of the world. That has been needlessly squandered, and it is not easily regained.
I’ll always remember an event in Bangkok in January 2002. A nice Thai man, after I told him I was American, told me he was sorry about what happened to my country. I had to ask him what he was talking about (q.v. Patriotic Music from Ghetto Blasters). In the bigger picture, maybe worse things happen to his country’s people all the time. Maybe today he’d again say he was sorry about what’s happened to my country, but for a different reason. It’s as if all of our collective frustration at not having been able to hunt down bin Laden has been transferred onto Saddam. Are we blinded by our outrage? We become what we love—and what we hate.
The Constitution says simply, clearly, emphatically: Congress shall declare war. Only Congress. No one else. Not the President. Not the judiciary. Not the military. Only Congress. 100 Senators and 435 Representatives elected by, and acting for, the people of the U.S.
Last October, a majority of Members of the 107th Congress, a majority in the House and Senate—voted to transfer that authority to the President.
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“Don’t tie my hands,” the President said. Don’t tie the President’s hands. What did the Founders think of that? Thomas Jefferson in 1798 said, “In questions of power, then, let no more be heard of confidence in man, but bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution.” Bind him down from mischief by the chains of the Constitution. Tie his hands? That is not enough. We should chain him to the Constitution. We in Congress are supposed to be chained to the Constitution.
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Finally from another perspective, author Edward Gibbon wrote in the History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, “The principles of a free Constitution are irrevocably lost, when the legislative power is taken over by the Executive.”
Indeed, I believe we are witnessing the end of America as a democracy.
I’m told this speech was met, on the Senate floor, with utter silence.
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