Shane Mason has a great post on this week's Republican presidential debate. Most revealing are comments by Mike Huckabee that essentially call for repeal of the U.S. Constitution. No force, not even Congress, can stop a president who wishes to start a war, Huckabee says.
Ron Paul appears to be the sole voice of sanity. "Why don't we just open up the Constitution and read it?" he says.
The silent conspiracy by both political parties to repeal constitutional provisions on the power to declare war continues to baffle and appall me. And the one candidate who appears to understand what the founding fathers intended, and why they intended it, is routinely dismissed by both parties as a kook.
Incredible.
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In their defense, Paul is a bit of a kook known for hanging out with White Supremacists and anti-Semites.
Still, he's correct that the Constitution requires the Congress to declare War.
Yet more proof that good ideas and awful ones can occasionally walk hand-in-hand.
Matt,
Naturally, Paul believes a lot of things that I disagree with. The Constitution contains numerous provisions that require constant readjusting of various tensions -- between federal power and state powers, for example, or between public order and individual liberty -- and reasonable people can disagree about exactly where the line should be drawn.
But the power to declare war is not one of those issues. The Constitution explicitly gives Congress 100 percent of the power to declare war and the president 0 percent. And the writings of the founding fathers make it clear that is exactly what they intended.
What's so frustrating about this, and the reason I keep harping on it, is that nobody has the courage to say the founding fathers were wrong. But both parties seem to agree that the fathers should be ignored.
There has not been a declared war fought since the end of WWII. Reason? We've not been attacked. We've been the aggressor. That may well be the difference. Very hard to muster a congressional vote for an illegal invasion. Best just to let it rest on the president.
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