Can the President lead us into war without a declaration of war?

But we did not engage in hostilities until after we were attacked and the Congress had declared war.

I am not including small scale actions in the need for Congress to declare war. </font>[/QUOTE]Some might say that supplying Britian and the Soviet Union with weapons was engaging in hostilities. If you are in an altercation with someone and his friend hands him a weapon is the friend engaged in hostilities?

 

To be fair, every time the US has scratched its backside since 1776, it's probably been considered an act of hostility to someone somewhere.

 

The president can do anything we the people allow him to do.

 

FTR, what do you think about my post above from FindLaw?

 

I will have to go back to your seven points, I will look at them this week end and try to get back, it looks like some of them will require some extra studying on my part.

 

“War,” said James Madison, asking Congress for a declaration in 1812, “is a solemn question which the Constitution wisely confides in the legislative department of the government.”

No constitution can be accounted wise if it makes war easy. Therefore, the U.S. Constitution makes war formal. No matter how docile Congress may become, how imperial the modern presidency may seem, presidential war is unconstitutional. As the clouds of preemptive war gather over the Middle East, President Bush has already circumvented the clear, lofty language of the Constitution: “Congress shall have the power to declare war.”

How easily we forget that the doctrine of preemptive war -- a doctrine integral to the ideology of fascism in the 1930s -- was explicitly repudiated at Nuremberg. As a presiding Judge at the Nuremberg Trials between 1945 and 1949, U.S. Supreme Court Justice Jackson wrote: “War is utterly renounced and condemned as an instrument of policy.” The Nuremberg Trials were influenced, not only by the lofty ideals of the enlightenment, but by the sagacious principles of James Madison. In the U.S. Constitution, war does not fall under foreign policy; it falls under law.

Justice Jackson addressed the constitutional issue of undeclared war in 1952, when President Harry S. Truman directed the secretary of commerce to take over most of the nation’s steel mills to fulfill the needs of the Korean War. The Supreme Court ruled that a president, whatever emergencies he may declare, cannot take over private industry or private property without a formal declaration of war. Concurring Justice Robert Jackson wrote: “No penance would ever expiate the sin against free government of holding that a president can escape control of executive powers by law through assuming his military role ... . It is not a military prerogative, without support of law, to seize persons or property because they are important or even essential for the military and naval establishments.”

For the authors of the Constitution, the solemnity of war and respect for the opinions of mankind required open declaration. Even the war for independence was proclaimed in a Declaration of Independence.” In the constitutional sense,” as Justice William O. Douglas put it, “a foreign nation is not an enemy until and unless war has been declared against it.”

The framers of the Constitution did not believe in ex post facto consent; nor did they give Congress a petty power to hem, haw, whine and weasel. Blank-check presidential, discretionary wars are not part of the U.S. Constitution.

The framers of the Constitution deliberately outlawed presidential war. At the Constitutional Convention the framers were confronted with three options regarding war: war declared by the President, war declared by the Senate, and war declared by the entire Congress. Hamilton’s draft of the Constitution, handed to Madison in 1789, read: “The Senate shall exclusively possess the power of declaring war ... .” In the Federalist Papers he recounted the history of kingly power in making wars, and he praised those subjects who attempted to “abolish the exercise of so dangerous an authority.” Even to the anti-populist Federalists, war was a formal, solemn legislative matter.

The fear of standing armies, the fear of rulers who might abuse their power, shaped much of the Constitution. For centuries, rulers had squandered the wealth of nations in expeditions to foreign lands, hiding their own mistakes with the shroud of war. For centuries the tyrants of Greece, the Caesars of Rome, and the princes of Europe cheated their nations into war, using war itself to persuade the people that war was necessary. For centuries, war had been an instrument of vanity, ambition and empire. For centuries the rulers of “republics” used the cry of foreign policy to overturn domestic right, submitting life and liberty to the alteration of a map.

Reflecting on the history of ruined peoples, the authors of the Constitution wrote: “Congress shall have the power to declare war.”

SOURCE

 

Can congress both except contributions and gratuities from lobbists for the military industrial complex and other major corporations that always seem to profit best at times of war, and really be expected to just turn off the money spiget for war any time they choose?

What of the control the bankers clearly hold and have held over congress since well, 1792?? Don't these stand to profit from loans and credit to the MIC and other major corporations that always seem to profit best in times of war?

One would have to believe that congress was acting on the best interests of ordinary citizens to have such a view FTR.

Ron Paul

 

I would argue as Hamilton did, that if another nation formally declares war on us, then the President has the authority to use the military to defend us from that nation without a formal declaration of war by Congress, because war was already declared by the attacking nation. This is why I support using the military to go after Ossama and those responsible for 9/11, but I am opposed to the war in Iraq, because they never attacked us, and there was not declaration of war by Congress before we invaded their country.

 

I believe that if the President has absolute proof that there is an imminent threat of some nation preparing to attack us, then he should have no problem getting Congress to declare war against that nation. Iraq was NOT an imminent threat to the US! Spreading democracy around the world, and removing dictators is not a Constitutional responsibility of the President. Jefferson summed up the best foreign policy position perfectly in his 1801 inaugural address: "Peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all nations – entangling alliances with none."

I just believe it is not only unconstitutional, but very dangerous to allow one man to be the one who determains soley wether we are going to spend billions of dollars and thousands of lives to go to war against another nation, this is a decision I belive our founding fathers wanted to go through the same checks and balances that all other descisions in Washington have to go through.

 

Thanks for suggesting The Founders Constitution in the other thread, I found where Hamilton talks about declaring war in;

Document 11

Alexander Hamilton, The Examination, no. 1
17 Dec. 1801Papers 25:454--57

That instrument has only provided affirmatively, that, "The Congress shall have power to declare War;" the plain meaning of which is that, it is the peculiar and exclusive province of Congress, when the nation is at peace, to change that state into a state of war; whether from calculations of policy or from provocations or injuries received: in other words, it belongs to Congress only, to go to War. But when a foreign nation declares, or openly and avowedly makes war upon the United States, they are then by the very fact, already at war, and any declaration on the part of Congress is nugatory: it is at least unnecessary. This inference is clear in principle, and has the sanction of established practice. It is clear in principle, because it is self-evident, that a declaration by one nation against another, produce at once a complete state of war between both; and that no declaration on the other side can at all vary their relative situation: and in practice it is well known, that nothing is more common, than when war is declared by one party, to prosecute mutual hostilities, without a declaration by the other.

Source: The Founders Constitution

 

Here is another exceprt from The Founders Constitution that helps explain why our founding fathers didn't want to give the President the power to declare war, they didn't want the President to be like the king of Great Britain:

The President, therefore, is to command the military forces of the United States, and this power I think a proper one; at the same time it will be found to be sufficiently guarded. A very material difference may be observed between this power, and the authority of the king of Great Britain under similar circumstances. The king of Great Britain is not only the commander-in-chief of the land and naval forces, but has power, in time of war, to raise fleets and armies. He has also authority to declare war. The President has not the power of declaring war by his own authority, nor that of raising fleets and armies. These powers are vested in other hands. The power of declaring war is expressly given to Congress, that is, to the two branches of the legislature--the Senate, composed of representatives of the state legislatures, the House of Representatives, deputed by the people at large. They have also expressly delegated to them the powers of raising and supporting armies, and of providing and maintaining a navy.

Source: The Founding Documents

 

Who's educating the vigilant voters? Individualists or collectivists? If you are trying to make decisions based on the collectivist idea of the greater good for the greater number, how are you going to understand a document written by individualists for individualists?

 

Oops! Didn't mean to double post.