Diamondeye wrote:
Point out where in the Constitution it says that the President needs a declaration of war to take any particular action as Commander in Chief.
Let's start with this:
Amendment 10 wrote:
The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people.
So it follows that the President does not have the power to do something unless the document specifically grants it to him elsewhere. Now let's look at the only thing the Constitution has to say about the president with regards to the military:
Article 2, Section 2 wrote:
The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States;
Emphasis mine. The conditional qualification here is not accidental. Note that nowhere in the Constitution does it state that the President has power to call the military into the service of the United States -- only that
when they have been, he has the power to command them.
So, if not the President, does the Constitution grant the power to call the military into service to
anyone? Why, yes:
Article 1, Section 8 wrote:
To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water;
Declaring war is not just a political gesture unless you are unfamiliar with war
is.
The OED wrote:
war, n.
1. a. Hostile contention by means of armed forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state; the employment of armed forces against a foreign power, or against an opposing party in the state.
So in other words, Article 1, Section 8 grants Congress the power to declare the employment of armed forces against, etc. I.e., the power to call the military into service of the United States. Not the President.
And, after all, this particular method of division of power is highly consistent with the rest of the document. It is exactly what we would expect: one branch directs, another executes, and the last reviews.
Except that it does not. "When in sevice of the United States" refers to the State militias; normally they are in State service. The Federal military is always in the service of the United States.
I'm sure someone will show up with some line of bullshit about how sentence structure means yadda yadda yadda, but the fact of the matter is that your interpretation would mean that when the Federal military was not "called into the service of the United States" it would
, and, for all intents and purposes, be unaccountable to civilian leadership. This is something the Founding Fathers, especially George Washington, could not possibly have overlooked, so regardless of what errors they might have made in phrasing that clause, that is what it actually means, by both logic and precedent.
The 10th Ammendment is utterly irrelevant here. The President has the power to command the military, explicitly granted. Trying to find semantic ways around it that create unnacceptable, glaring holes in the way the government would work is just trying to find ways to be right on the internet. The power to declare war is the same; it is pure assumption that the PResident needs a declaration of war to engage in military action; no such connection is established anywhere.
Login
Register
FAQ
Search
