Is offensive war becoming redundant?

[Astronuc]

NYTimes, Editorial Observer - July 23, 2007
Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War
By ADAM COHEN

The nation is heading toward a constitutional showdown over the Iraq war. Congress is moving closer to passing a bill to limit or end the war, but President Bush insists Congress doesn’t have the power to do it. “I don’t think Congress ought to be running the war,” he said at a recent press conference. “I think they ought to be funding the troops.” He added magnanimously: “I’m certainly interested in their opinion.”

The war is hardly the only area where the Bush administration is trying to expand its powers beyond all legal justification. But the danger of an imperial presidency is particularly great when a president takes the nation to war, something the founders understood well. In the looming showdown, the founders and the Constitution are firmly on Congress’s side.

Given how intent the president is on expanding his authority, it is startling to recall how the Constitution’s framers viewed presidential power. They were revolutionaries who detested kings, and their great concern when they established the United States was that they not accidentally create a kingdom. To guard against it, they sharply limited presidential authority, which Edmund Randolph, a Constitutional Convention delegate and the first attorney general, called “the foetus of monarchy.”

The founders were particularly wary of giving the president power over war. They were haunted by Europe’s history of conflicts started by self-aggrandizing kings. John Jay, the first chief justice of the United States, noted in Federalist No. 4 that “absolute monarchs will often make war when their nations are to get nothing by it, but for the purposes and objects merely personal.”

Many critics of the Iraq war are reluctant to suggest that President Bush went into it in anything but good faith. But James Madison, widely known as the father of the Constitution, might have been more skeptical. “In war, the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed,” he warned. “It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered; and it is the executive brow they are to encircle.”

. . . .

Too bad we do not have great leaders like Madison and Jay these days.

 

[laurelelizabeth]

In my less lucid moments I see a solution to 2 major world problems with a single solution. A massive nuclear strike on the Middle East, would eliminate the fundamentalist Islam problem while inducing a nuclear winter to stop global warming.

Er... I've sort of thought of that type of thing too. Not seriously, just more along the lines of Anyone who wants to hurt someone else or feels their life is not worth living (whichly would probably be me if i lived in some war torn place) could drop dead, thus getting rid of overpopulation too. I'm not serious about it of course :)

I'm not sure if a nuclear winter would be that great. I'd like for there to not be any sort of uncontrollable variables, just reduction in pollution and stuff, so mother nature can slowly take care of herself :)

 

[edward]

NYTimes, Editorial Observer - July 23, 2007
Just What the Founders Feared: An Imperial President Goes to War
By ADAM COHEN


Too bad we do not have great leaders like Madison and Jay these days.

Look at the date on this one. Executive orders and executive privilege are the keys to the Bush/Cheney black government. Someone needs to change the locks.

Bush acting as imperial president

Wednesday, July 3, 2002

By HELEN THOMAS
HEARST NEWSPAPERS

WASHINGTON -- The imperial presidency has arrived. On the domestic front President Bush has found that in many ways he can govern by executive order. In foreign affairs he has the nerve to tell other people that they should get rid of their current leaders.

Amazingly, with Americans turning into a new silent majority and Congress into a bunch of obeisant lawmakers, he is getting away with such acts.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/opinion/76988_helen3.shtml

When Clinton tried to use executive privilege to stop testimony about his sex scandal, he was over ridden by congress because of the importance of the nature of the testimony.

Bush has set himself up as America's first Czar, and he is getting away with it. Many republicans have seen the light but hesitate to do anything meaningful even though Bush doesn't even listen to them anymore. Rove has cleverly convinced the the Democrats that they should all be out on the campaign trail.

I never in my wildest dreams thought that I would see this country in a situation like this.