With the latest foiled terrorist plot and the pronouncements from the likes of Rush Limbaugh calling for war with Iran, and Joe Lieberman posturing the same regarding Yemen, it may be a good time to address a matter I hinted at in a previous post when I suggested we have become “a lazy democracy sequestered in a museum of past heroic thoughts and deeds”. The laziness I refer to is the inattention to the duties prescribed by the Constitution. Particularly, I have in mind the duty of the House of Representatives and Senate, “To declare war, grant letters of marquee and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water”. It is obvious the relationship this clause bears to our present controversies regarding the wars we are presently engaged in, together with matters regarding the status of prisoners held in legal limbo.

We are apparently content with rhetorical whining over partisan recalcitrance in the legislative branch, and somehow delude ourselves it will be resolved by electing different ratios of Republicans or Democrats. It may be better if those elected, regardless of political affiliation, were simply held accountable to fidelity to the Constitution. Granted there can be differences of opinion on almost any issue, but in the case of war, abdicating responsibility unnecessarily by deferring to the War Powers Act, is the recipe for partisan, then national division. Since WWII has there been a war where the circumstances were so exigent and threatening to our national existence that deliberation and a considered vote for war in the Congress posed a fatal or dangerous delay to our prospects for safety or success? Alexander Hamilton’s prescience was displayed in Federalist Papers 8 and 6 respectively when he observed, “It is the nature of war to increase the executive at the expense of legislative authority”, and “Has it not, on the contrary, invariably been found that momentary passions, and immediate interests, have a more active and imperious control over human conduct than general and remote considerations of policy, utility or justice. Have republics, in practice, been less addicted to war than monarchies?” Large portions of the Federalist Papers are elaborations on the causes of the failure of prior historic attempts at republican government, and war and its consequences, martial and domestic, weigh heavily in their demise. The form proposed by the Constitution, it was hoped, would assure the admixture of hot and more temperate blood of popularly elected representatives, and would result in the greatest wisdom directing this society from peace to war.

In this day when representatives from even the remotest districts from the capital, can arrive from their constituencies, or elsewhere in the world, in hours, and various forms of instantaneous and secure communication exist, where has the necessity to commit this nation to war by way of The War Powers Act demonstrated itself? Is it a coincidence that our wars with the greatest longevity, the lack of or even definition of victory, and fostering the most popular controversy and domestic division, have been those initiated on the authority of the executive branch? To reference Hamilton again, “Have we not already seen enough of the fallacy and extravagance of those idle theories which have amused us with promises of an exemption from the imperfections, weaknesses, and evils incident to society in every shape?” And are we to assume that conservatives are too pre-occupied with the travails of Tiger to give consideration to the existence of and/or application of the War Powers Act and its implication in the frequency and indeterminate nature of the wars that are morally and financially bankrupting this nation. I suggest the Constitution offers a better process, if our representatives aren’t too lackadaisical, timid, or indifferent to avail themselves of it.