Topic: Constitutional Issues
The Case for Real-time Checks and Balances on the Presidency It is time to amend the Constitutional war powers of the President and the Congress. Five of the last nine presidents have been guilty of deceit in the decision to enter into undeclared wars. Over 60,000 American military have been killed in these deceit-driven wars. Impeachment and the War Powers Resolution are inadequate preventives.by Ejner Fulsang
(centrist)
Sunday, September 16, 2007
I miss the Fifties. Things weren’t just kinder or simpler then. There were things you could believe in—icons you could fix your soul to. Take motherhood. Mothers were always the first place a child looked for nurturing and love. And teachers. Parents trusted teachers implicitly. If a child got a whipping from his teacher—they did that then—he could often count on another one when he got home. And while I was never a Catholic, I recall admiring Catholic priests. I always thought of them as Spencer Tracy’s Father Flanagan character in Boys Town—staunch pillars of moral courage.
It’s 2007 now, and the Fifties—like the icons they spawned—have not aged gracefully. Today we know mothers don’t always love their children; sometimes they drown them. Teachers are not always to be trusted with the care of their students; sometimes they seduce them. And Catholic priests are sometimes more interested in young orphans than they should be. As I leave middle age for old age, my heart is ever more burdened by reality.
I recently read a book on the impeachment of President George W. Bush. The author, Elizabeth Holtzman, was well-qualified, having served on the House Judiciary Committee that presided over the impeachment of then-President Richard Nixon. One of her primary arguments was that Bush, through his deceitful claim of Iraq’s harboring weapons of mass destruction, has engaged us a war that has thus far resulted in a body count in excess of 3,000 U.S. troops. With another 21,000 troops surging into the fray, I wondered if perhaps another icon of the Fifties—the Office of the President—is also suffering from reality, and if so, is it time we did something about it?
Presidents used to make great icons. Remember FDR’s ‘Nothing to fear but fear itself!’? Or those halcyon Eisenhower Years? And who, whether Republican or Democrat, could not have been inspired by Kennedy’s, ‘Ask not what your country can do for you’? I remember staying up late to watch the Nixon-Kennedy debates. I was so sure we had a great leader in John Kennedy. I was in sixth grade then.
History tells us that while Kennedy may have been a charismatic orator, he did have his faults. There was the Bay of Pigs fiasco of April 1961. A 1,500-man brigade of Cuban ex-patriots was induced to retake their homeland by force, assured that the U.S. Navy would be on hand to provide close air support. The assault took place and the Navy was in place, but at the last minute, President Kennedy forbade U.S. air support. The hapless invaders were blasted by Castro’s own air force. Over 100 men died and the rest captured. Some were tried and executed. The rest were sentenced to 30 years, and eventually ransomed to the U.S. government for $53 million in food and medicine.
Kennedy’s image recovered the following year with the Cuban missile crisis. While we children practiced duck-and-cover drills under our desks in school, our panicked parents stripped the supermarket shelves to stock their fallout shelters. Then the Soviets blinked. Crisis over, much celebration, everyone said, ‘We showed them!’ What everyone didn’t say was, ‘What about the U.S. nuclear missiles we agreed to remove from Turkey?’ Our steely-eyed president had done some back-channel blinking of his own. But we didn’t know that, and truth be told, we didn’t want to know that. We wanted an icon, something to hang our national trust on. It would be years before we realized that the icon of the presidency would not always deserve such trust.
A few years later, Kennedy was cut down by an assassin’s bullet. The nation was grief-stricken but at the same time reassured. What would have been a coup d’état in another country was a timely and orderly succession in America. The deceased president’s widow was at Lyndon Johnson’s side as he was sworn in the same day. Johnson even retained Kennedy’s staff—Dean Rusk as Secretary of State, Robert McNamara as Secretary of Defense. Long live the king.
Johnson wasted no time putting into place his dream project, the Great Society. Where Johnson lacked Kennedy’s gift of oration to the American public, he more than made up for it with his tremendous pull in Congress. As it turned out the Great Society proved a magnificent distraction from the shady goings on in Vietnam.
The Kennedy administrations had left Johnson a legacy of protecting democracy against communist encroachment in Southeast Asia—the Domino Theory. Johnson pursued this policy under OPLAN 34A (PT boat and commando operations initiated under Kennedy in May 1963), a top secret program wherein U.S.-sponsored raids were sent into North Vietnam with the goal of pressuring North Vietnam into withdrawing from its insurgency campaign in the south.
Then came the Tonkin Gulf Incident of August 2, 1964 wherein North Vietnamese gunboats fired torpedoes on the U.S. destroyer Maddox. The ship was engaged in De Soto reconnaissance missions off the coast of North Vietnam at the time. A second incident was alleged to have occurred on August 4th. Johnson ordered aircraft from the carriers Ticonderoga and Constellation to retaliate, attacking the PT boats and their harbors.
The first attack on the Maddox only resulted in a single machinegun round hit and the second attack is today believed to not have happened at all—not exactly Pearl Harbor. Johnson reported the Incident to Congress on August 5th as ‘deliberate attacks against U.S. naval vessels operating in international waters.’ Of course he made no mention of the OPLAN 34A raids that had been ongoing for over a year by then. Nor did he mention his own doubts as to the reality of the second attack, later describing it to Under Secretary of State George Ball as, ‘Hell, those dumb, stupid sailors were just shooting at flying fish!’[1]
Johnson wound up his speech to the Congress saying, ‘[the U.S.] seeks no wider war.’ The Congress responded by passing the Tonkin Gulf Resolution on August 7th, giving the President carte blanche to widen the war as much as he wanted. They had been snookered. By the time Johnson stepped down in January 1969, he had widened the war to 536 thousand U.S. troops in Vietnam and racked up a cumulative body count of 31 thousand.
Nixon won the presidency in 1968 on a campaign of ‘peace with honor.’ He resigned the presidency in dishonor in 1974 rather than face certain impeachment. There were five articles of impeachment under deliberation by the house Judiciary Committee. The first three—suborning perjury, abuse of powers, obstruction of justice—all passed. Article IV—income tax fraud—failed to pass. Article V—concealment of illegal bombing in Cambodia—failed to pass, ironic because it was the root cause of most of his other misdeeds. Nixon’s legacy to the war in Vietnam was another 15 thousand U.S. troops added to the overall body count.
Gerald Ford succeeded Nixon and subsequently pardoned him. Whether that pardon was quid pro quo for being allowed to succeed to the presidency is a secret that both Nixon and Ford carried to their graves. In the aftermath of Ford’s recent death he was eulogized for bringing the nation back together. Our interests would have been better served had he allowed the process of justice to press on without his interference.
Though Ford is most remembered for his pardon of Nixon, he liked to say his finest hour was the Mayaguez Incident of May 1975. Cambodian Khmer Rouge gunboats had seized a U.S. container ship, the SS Mayaguez, while it was on a routine resupply mission to Sattahip, Thailand. Ford’s National Security Council rushed through a rescue plan consisting of a Navy carrier, 15 Air Force helicopters and a battalion of Marines with orders to assault Koh Tang in the Gulf of Siam. The intelligence was bad and the planning was worse, but the real failure came from the Oval Office. Gerald Ford knew the crew was not on Koh Tang and he knew it 20 hours before the Marines landed on the beach, yet he allowed the assault to go forward anyway. The Cambodians released the crew the morning of the assault.
The man the press had labeled as the do-nothing president was bound to do something. That ‘something’ killed eighteen men that day, one of whom was my friend, Richard Van de Geer, the last name on the Vietnam Veterans Wall. The dead were left to lie where they fell. Three of them were abandoned alive, later captured and executed by the Khmer Rouge. A body count of just one was allowed to persist in the press for weeks after the event so as not to ruin the positive spin Ford was enjoying in the press. No attempt was made to recover the fallen for the next twenty years. Eight are still unaccounted for.
History has yet to uncover any deceit-driven wars from Presidents Carter, Reagan, Bush the elder, or Clinton. This may change. Reagan’s Iran-Contra Affair is still a question mark in his administration. Clinton was a known quibbler, impeached for it by the House in 1998. I do not believe Carter or Bush the elder ever put troops in harm’s way for deceitful reasons. Still, five out of the last nine U.S. presidents are known to have behaved deceitfully in either the decision to enter or in the waging of undeclared wars. The death toll in these deceit-driven wars amounts to over 60,000 American military. And with no end in sight in our current war in Iraq, that number is likely to grow.
***
Because of the deceit behind our involvement in these wars, such a death toll is tantamount to mass murder. Legally, this is not far-fetched. If someone induces another to venture onto ice that they know to be too thin to support their weight, and that person falls through the ice and drowns, the perpetrator can be charged with murder. Icy water is hazardous. War is hazardous. Deceitfully inducing people to enter into war is murder.
A single murder deserves prosecution, and if the perpetrator is found guilty, a suitable punishment. The likelihood of prosecution and punishment is held to be an adequate deterrent for others to commit murder. In actuality, this is debatable. The U.S. has one of the highest murder rates in the world. But such preventive measures are insufficient for the crime of mass murder. Mass murder warrants stronger measures. Impeachment is an inadequate deterrent since it comes after the fact and it carries no punitive action. And as we saw in the case of Nixon and Ford, it is too easy, irrespective of whether it actually happened, for a vice president to bargain his succession to the presidency in return for a pardon.
Neither are laws an inadequate preventive measure. The most defining law we have on the books today is the War Powers Resolution of 1973 (Public Law 93-148). Under this law, the President is required to consult with the Congress prior to the start of hostile action and to cease such action and remove U.S. forces after sixty days if the Congress has not declared war or passed a resolution authorizing the use of military force. This law was tested in 1975 with Ford during the Mayaguez Incident. Many congressmen complained that the president did not consult with the Congress, but instead informed them of his intentions without giving them adequate time to review and deliberate. Indeed, no congressmen were present at the National Security meetings when the vital intelligence of the matter was being presented.
Another flaw in the War Powers Resolution was illustrated in the passage of the Joint Resolution to Invade Iraq (Public Law 107-243, October 16, 2002). The basis for this resolution was the belief by the Congress in the President’s assertion that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction. As we have seen today this was not true. Congress was again snookered by the President. All of the government’s intelligence gathering capabilities belong to the President. Congress can subpoena various members of the intelligence community and question them in closed sessions to protect classified material, but at the end of the day, the man on the stand has to go home to his boss and report what he said.
A final flaw in the War Powers Resolution comes in careful reading of the Resolution to Invade Iraq. It has an excellent grievance list found in Section 1—no less than twenty-three ‘Whereas’ clauses. It addresses diplomacy in Section 2 although it limits the discussion to a pat on the back to the President for trying to work with the United Nations. A better treatment would have stipulated why continued diplomacy would be counterproductive. But the real flaw comes in Section 3 (a) where:
The President is authorized to use the Armed Forces of the United States as he determines to be necessary and appropriate in order to—
(1) defend the national security of the United States against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and
(2) enforce all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq.
The problem with the above is that given success, how do we know when we’ve achieved it? What are the victory conditions? When do we come home? For that matter, given failure, how do we know we’ve failed? Under what circumstances should we withdraw? The guidance given the President is too open-ended. We have long since stopped worrying about weapons of mass destruction. The President has all but admitted he was wrong in that regard. He is now hell-bent on democratizing a region that has no concept of what a democracy is—small wonder that left to their own devices the Iraqis formed a theocracy instead.
Our forces are fighting an insurgency they cannot win. And even if they could, the entire country is enmeshed in a civil war that the President refuses to acknowledge. Where the Joint Resolution to Invade Iraq complained that the Saddam regime was guilty of harboring international terrorists, recruitment for terrorist groups has now become easy with Islamic fundamentalist hatred fanned by our continued presence in Iraq.
When Congress urged the United States Institute of Peace to form the Iraq Study Group to report on the prognosis for Iraq, they concluded we should attempt to push more responsibility onto the Iraqi military and police and then begin withdrawing our own forces. The President, as is his custom whenever he is forced to confront opposing views, gathered around him some advisors whom he could count upon to agree with him and concluded the war was still winnable with the addition of 21 thousand more troops. A desperate Senate is now attempting to pass a non-binding, bipartisan resolution opposing that surge. I am reminded of Vietnam of the 1971-73 timeframe when a similarly desperate Congress was attempting to rein in a stubborn President Nixon with its Cooper-Church and Case-Church amendments. Iraq cannot be won, but it can be made worse. The whole situation could have been contained from the outset had we limited the President’s objectives to something like the following:
Find, document, and eliminate the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction infrastructure to include inventory if any; and
Eliminate Saddam Hussein and his upper tier Baath Party infrastructure.
Iraq already had a government, maybe not a Jeffersonian democracy, but at least one that worked. The Iraqi people would be far better off today under that government had we contented ourselves with removing the paranoid excesses of Saddam Hussein.
***
At any rate, with impeachment proving to be an inadequate deterrent, and with the War Powers Resolution so easily circumvented, I believe it is time to consider rewriting the constitutional war powers clauses of the Congress and the President. The Constitution, though elegant in the extreme, has never been considered perfect. We have amended it twenty-seven times through a process established under Article V.
War powers are defined for the Congress in Article I, Section 8, and for the President in Article II, Section 8. Under these respective sections, the Congress is granted the authority to declare war, while President is defined to be the commander in chief of the Army and Navy and the states’ militias when called into service of the Federal Government. The problem with this arrangement is that in telling the Congress they could declare war, the Constitution failed to tell the President he could not wage undeclared war. And as we have seen, merely passing laws to that effect are not adequate.
An additional and probably its greatest short-coming is the fact that the Executive Branch owns all the intelligence gathering and analysis resources. The President must take it upon himself to inform the Congress when he believes we are threatened, and as we have seen, the President can tell the Congress anything he wants and often does.
If the root cause of the problem lies in the wording of the Constitution, then a revision of same is in order. To that end, the following is suggested with the understanding that it would have to be rewritten following the amendment format of Article V:
Article I, Section 8 – The current wording shall be stricken:
The Congress shall have power to declare war,
Article I, Section 8 – The following wording shall be added:
The Congress shall maintain a bicameral war-powers committee that shall maintain the sole power to declare war when it deems necessary. This committee shall consist of a minimum of six members from the Senate and eighteen members from the House of Representatives. To the extent practical, all political parties of the Congress shall be proportionately represented on this committee. One third of the membership shall be renewed every two years. The senior members of the Senate and House shall act as co-chairmen of the committee.Declarations of war must be ratified by a two thirds majority from both Houses except in cases where American soil is under direct attack and time is of the essence. In those cases a temporary declaration of war may be effected with a two thirds concurrence from each of the Senate and House of Representative members of the committee.
Declarations of war, whether temporary or otherwise, must as a minimum consist of the following elements:
a. A statement of the grievances to include identification of the perpetrators and the victims;
b. A statement of the goals to be pursued in the prosecution of this war;
c. A statement as to why diplomacy was either tried and failed, or was not tried;
d. A definition of the victory conditions to include post-victory goals should military success be achieved;
e. A definition of the withdrawal conditions to include post withdrawal goals should military failure occur.
This committee shall be charged with maintaining its own national security intelligence gathering capability separate and apart from that of the Executive Branch.
Article II, Section 2 – The current wording shall be left intact:
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;
Article II, Section 2 – The following wording shall be added:
The President is forbidden to declare war or prosecute American interests by military means except when expressly ordered to do so by the Congress or when American soil is under direct military attack and time is of the essence.
In the event that the President deems American soil to be under direct military attack, and unilaterally initiates defensive military measures, but the Congress’ bicameral war-powers committee either votes down or fails to vote in a temporary declaration of war, then the President shall withdraw all military forces that were committed to the endeavor.
If the President fails to comply in a timely and satisfactory manner to the dictates of the war-powers committee, the President, Vice President, and Secretaries of State and Defense shall be immediately suspended from office and, if necessary, incarcerated until such time as their individual criminal and/or neglectful behavior can be determined in a court of law. The Speaker of the House shall temporarily assume the duties of the President while this matter is resolved. If in the case of the President and/or Vice President the outcomes are guilty, the Speaker and President of the House of Representatives shall serve out the President’s and Vice President’s terms, respectively. At the end of said terms a new general election shall be held.
The above changes focus on differentiating the war powers of the President and the Congress. They are also consistent with the ideal that the Congress says what to do while the President is charged with doing it.
The role of the Congress is procedurally expanded via a war-powers committee. By spreading the authority across both Houses, the ability to make timely decisions is preserved. Requiring the war-powers committee to seek ratification before the whole of Congress provides a necessary check against one committee acting in its own interests rather than in defense of the Constitution. The necessity of war as an option and the intent/goals of same are stipulated. An intelligence gathering and evaluating agency that is independent of the Executive Branch is provided for.
The President is expressly forbidden to declare or prosecute war unilaterally except under certain circumstances, i.e., in response to a direct threat on American soil. Provisions for immediate removal from office and as well as the potential for punishment are stipulated as an added deterrent. Moreover, by implying shared blame among the President, Vice President, and Secretaries of State and Defense, the tendency to place loyalty to a man above loyalty to the Constitution is lessened.
The above is hoped to be an improvement but not expected to be perfection. Some would criticize that the last thing we need is another intelligence agency. Perhaps we could reassign one of the three existing agencies to the Congress. It would have a focus on whether to engage in war while the remaining two that still answer to the President would focus on how to engage in war. It is also recognized that such a committee with its mandatory high turn-over rate might suffer from incompetence regarding defense. Like the existing staffs of the Armed Services Committees, they would be heavily dependent on their fixed staffs to lend technical expertise.
Others might argue that the Congress, with its propensity for endless debate, is ill-equipped to make timely decisions in a time of crisis. That could be true, although it is mitigated by the power of the President to act unilaterally in cases of direct attack on American soil. And there is something to be said for not doing anything. The Vietnam conflict cost us a great deal in men in materiel, yet in the end, the country went communist anyway. Soldiers withheld from battle today shall live to fight another day. It’s not a perfect rule but it bears consideration.
Finally, there is always the possibility that one member of Congress might attempt to ‘horse-trade’ another with a request to put military pressure on some foreign country so as to offer some advantage to that member of Congress’ state or district. We have that problem today and will continue to have it in spite of the activities of the Ethics and Judiciary committees. As I see it, all of the above disadvantages can be overcome procedurally, but even at their worst, they are a vast improvement over losing thousands of men and women to deceit-driven wars.
***
One of our nation’s most precious resources is the large supply of young men and women who are willing to take up arms, and if necessary die, in the defense of America and her ideals. I worry though that if the trend toward Oval Office deceit continues, one day the bugle will sound but no one will heed the call to arms.
I am a third generation soldier, a Vietnam era chopper pilot, a graduate of West Point, and a former infantryman. Altogether, I spent 13 years in the Army. I always figured that if I ever did end up in a real shooting war, I might die. However, I would like to know that if I had died it would have been for a worthy cause—and there are many worth fighting for even today. But I would especially like to know that the reason I thought I was fighting was the same as the reason I was actually fighting.
I still miss the Fifties and I expect I always will. Today I realize that the Fifties I thought I knew never really existed. They were a dream, albeit a pleasant one. Today I am saddened that such measures as I am proposing are necessary. But at least I have had enough coffee over the last forty-odd years to accept reality when I see it.
The End
[1] George W. Ball, The Past Has Another Pattern (New York: Norton, 1982), p. 379.
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Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2007-09-16 14:24:24
It's an interesting proposal. I'm one of the many who has complained in the past about wars that lacked Congressional declarations.
However, I don't believe that the changes you propose to the Constitution will accomplish anything real. While Congress didn't officially declare war on Iraq, there was no doubt that such a declaration would have passed. Only a handful of Democrats stood opposed, along with Republican Ron Paul. That was it.
Nor would events have likely led to a "suspension" of the President and his top people pending an investigation. In fact, there's nothing clear in your proposal about who would have the power to suspend them. Congress? Some might say that would enable an effective coup d'etat for political purposes. The Courts? But that takes the Judicial Branch even further from being an interpreter of the Constitution, making them more of an executor. The fact is that Congress even now has trouble getting votes to hold President Bush accountable in even the most benign ways. Do you actually think the current Congress would have the cajones to follow through with a suspension, even if the Constitution authorized it? I doubt it.
And who would sit on this Congressional junta? Clearly, the most powerful politicians in Congress would play the roles. These are the same people who get our current presidents elected in the first place. They're a part of the problem, so how can we reasonably expect them to be a part of the solution?
In the final analysis, the problem isn't really the Constitution at all. It already makes clear what is right and what is wrong. The problem is that the people who act on our behalf: Congress, the President, and the Courts, don't use good judgment to honor their pledges to "preserve, protect, and defend" the Constitution. No amount of Constitutional amending can change that.
Instead, we the people need to make it clear that we're tired of business-as-usual and that we want the Constitution to be strictly interpreted and enforced. Unfortunately, the people show no signs of developing that kind of backbone.
Harry Truman's sign on his desk said, "The Buck Stops Here," but in truth the buck stops with the American voters. As long as voters insist on passing the buck by continuing to vote for the lesser of two evils instead of demanding good candidates, this and other, similar problems are not going to go away no matter what changes we make to the Constitution.
I honestly cannot say if your proposed changes would stop this needless slaughter of war or not. What I do know from working for the federal government since 1958, serving on the battlefields of Vietnam, and campaigning for a seat in the U.S. Senate in 1992 is that war is a television event for most Americans. In 2006, only one out of every eleven Americans read a book. They know what the media wants them to know. Add to that the fact that war is jobs and jobs mean paychecks, and it's easy to understand that when morality collides with commerce, morality loses. It is also worth mentioning that the Republican Party, my party, controls the vast majority of the news media outlets not only in the United States, but in what's commonly known as the free world. As organized labor gained control of our three branches of government early on with muscle and a few well placed dollars, corporate America upped the ante and bought some Yale and Harvard graduates who almost annihilated their foes in courts of law. And if you think Americans really support our troops, just step outside and count the yellow ribbons and flags, if you're lucky enough to see a few, on passing vehicles. When Americans grow tired and/or ashamed of a war, they distance themselves from it just exactly like members of Congress are putting distance between themselves and Bush. I am proud of you for thinking enough of Old Glory to put forth this effo
You're both holding me to a standard of perfection. I'm only shooting for an improvement.
The key issue is whether a war is easier or harder to enable under my proposal. The basic principle I am following is that it is usually easier to put a deceitful plan into action when the power is concentrated in a single person. The best way I know to ensure that something will NOT get done is to hand it over to a committee
As to the makeup of the committee, it is clearly spelled out and also designed to ensure that no one is able to homestead on that committee. (See below.)
This committee shall consist of a minimum of six members from the Senate and eighteen members from the House of Representatives. To the extent practical, all political parties of the Congress shall be proportionately represented on this committee. One third of the membership shall be renewed every two years. The senior members of the Senate and House shall act as co-chairmen of the committee
Another key issue is the fact that the Congress has no intelligence gathering arm of its own. Hence, they are beholden to issuing subpoenas to persons from the intel community who work for the President. This makes it too easy for a man like W to stack the deck as he did in 2003 when he hoodwinked the Congress into supporting his personal invasion of Ira
Lastly, if you still don't like my idea, what would you propose? The face remains that five out of the last nine presidents have involved us in deceit-driven wars. Should we take corrective action or just complain about it? There comes a time when my father's favorite adage applies, "Ejner, dammit, do something, even if it's wrong." (He was a career artilleryman, WWII, Korea, and Vietnam.) That's really the short of it--bitch & moan, or do somethin
Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2007-09-17 08:40:48
Ejner,
I didn't mean to suggest that your proposal isn't worth considering. But as you said, "The key issue is whether a war is easier or harder to enable under my proposal. The basic principle I am following is that it is usually easier to put a deceitful plan into action when the power is concentrated in a single person."
The Constitution already places the power to declar war in the hands of more than one person. Actually, it's currently in the hands of 535 members of Congress and the Senate. Yet, just as clearly, the power is abused by not even being honored at all. Congress after Congress simply ignores the fact that their power is trampled upon by the President. That's why I really don't think a special 24 member Congressional panel is going to be any more effective.
So long as the President claims the right to put American troops into harm's way without a declaration of war by Congress, and so long as Congress refuses to hold him to the Constitutional standard, your proposal really won't alter much, will it?
It's just another example of asking those who created the problems in the first place to fix them, and then expecting them to do so without oversight. The only oversight of Congress comes (supposedly) from the voters, and the voters aren't doing their job.
If you really want to look at what's causing all this, I suggest you take a look at legislation such as the Federal Election Campaign Act of 1971 and its subsequent enhancements, up to and including the Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. These various pieces of legislation, in combination with the various redistricting schemes used, collectively serve to make it nearly impossible to knock off incumbent legislators during an election cycle.
Among other things, it is now illegal for anyone who is not part of a political campaign or a member of the major media to say or write anything negative about a Federal candidate within 60 days of the election. Effectively, you and I are prohibited from expressing our opinions during the heat of an election race!
Also, the onerous finance reporting laws effectively make it impossible for any but a well-financed campaign (measured in the millions of dollars) from even participating in the electoral process. Add in ridiculous ballot access restrictions in all 50 states plus DC, and good third parties that would actually do things like strictly interpreting the Constitution (such as the Libertarian party) are effectively closed out of the system by law.
Oh sure, the law doesn't actually prohibit such third parties. It just makes it ridiculously difficult for them to make any headway.
Finally, the Constitutional requirement that Presidential elections be decided by an electoral college rather than by popular vote makes it even more unlikely that third parties can effectively participate.
Instead of a Constitutional proposal, perhaps you should be looking to propose introducing real liberty into existing public law.
So long as the President claims the right to put American troops into harm's way without a declaration of war by Congress, and so long as Congress refuses to hold him to the Constitutional standard, your proposal really won't alter much, will it?
That's why I put in the following clauses:
Article II, Section 2 – The following wording shall be added
The President is forbidden to declare war or prosecute American interests by military means except when expressly ordered to do so by the Congress or when American soil is under direct military attack and time is of the essence.
In the event that the President deems American soil to be under direct military attack, and unilaterally initiates defensive military measures, but the Congress’ bicameral war-powers committee either votes down or fails to vote in a temporary declaration of war, then the President shall withdraw all military forces that were committed to the endeavor.
Enforcement remains an issue as it always has. How many western movie plots can you recall wherein the cowardly sheriff finally finds his courage and takes back the town for the good of all? Playing this out, I can see where it might be a good idea for the Congress, in addition to its own intel gathering agency, to also maintain its own home defense army. The President is responsible for foreign aggression, the Congress internal aggression. Hmm..
Your point about the electoral college is a good one. I'm 58, yet I've refused to vote in all but one presidential election for exactly that reason. We call ourselves the land of the free, but wrongly so
Posted By: Walt Thiessen
Date: 2007-09-17 10:28:15
"Enforcement remains an issue as it always has."
Yeah, no kidding. But it's not as if Congress hasn't had the power to enforce the Constitution all along. They do have that power. Congressional power along these lines is called impeachment in severe cases, censure in lesser cases.
By continually looking to Congress to do the "sherriff's" work, when they're among the most culpable (2nd only to the President), you keep making the same mistake over and over again. When will you learn? Indeed, when will America learn?
See my comments on Mary's essay on Pelosi and impeachment. Meanwhile, we need less description, more prescription. Like I said, let's do SOMETHING, even if it's wrong. You gotta better idea, I'd like to hear it.
Dear Ejner: I'm not a West Point graduate like you; I went to a state teacher's college and finished 282 out of 294 graduates. I said right up front I didn't know if your proposed changes would make a difference or not. I do know that some relatives of mine in the hills of north Alabama stopped a sheriff who was declaring war on them almost weekly. They hung him. I don't know if 465 ropes, like the one used on Saddam, would be better than your plan. I just know it worked that one time.
It seems to me that you ignore the obvious to present complexity, in an effort to resolve a problem. Congress did not need to approve President's Bush military coup in Iraq. That check has long been in place and would have been effective. A "coallition of willing nations" was created by willing nations. That check was in place. Bush was re-elected by people who could have refused to vote for him, people who knew his agenda and history. I believe you are refusing to accurately assign responsibility, and in doing so, are attempting to smear around that responsibility to create yet more confusion.
The Executive Branch of government must have the ability to react quickly, without approval of Congress or voters. The difficulty comes about because of America's lack of foreign policy. We don't have one. Every president makes his own. All Diplomacy falls under the Executive Branch and every new President simply makes up any old foreign policy he wants to. And begins to implement his own idea of America's foreign policy. This is the real problem.
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