Does the 30-Day Clock begin today?
Cleaning out the basement this afternoon I found a Phamhlet and a law review article on the War Powers Resolution, from about 20 years ago. This is NOT about President Obama. A number of Presidents have chaffed under this Congressional Act. This is about our Constitution.
Regards — Cliff
1 comment:
Well, it is about the Constitution and specifically who gets to do what under Constitutional Law. One version, which is the one I favor, is that ONLY Congress has the authority to commit troops to battle, and once committed, the President, as CINC, gets to employ them as necessary. This concept has already been tested once under the theory of separation of powers when Jackson thumbed his nose at the Congress and was impeached by the House, failing to be removed from the Presidency by one vote in the Senate. Could this be replayed today given the abject animosity that exists between the House and the President? I believe it is a possibility. Certainly, there are enough votes in the House to successfully bring an impeachment motion. It is doubtful it would survive the Senate, but stranger things have happened in Federal legislative history.
At the very least, I expect that this may well underlie a Constitutional crisis necessitating a SCOTUS review on an emergency basis....something we haven't seen in quite some time.
I posit this based on my own opinion that Americans are pushed to their limits in re our finances and are in no particular mood to expend further tax dollars chasing Middle Eastern radicals around the land there.
It is interesting to note that while the Congress is empowered by the Constitution to maintain a Navy, it is not so authorized to do the same with an Army. Instead, that force is to be "raised" which implies that it would be derived (in modern day terms) from the National Guard forces from the states.
The 30 day period which has commenced yesterday is NOT for Presidential notification purposes, in fact, it is the period after a 60 day employment period specifically to withdraw forces from that engagement. This is a small, but exceedingly important point.
The other conflict that will be engaged is that the President is complying with a United Nations resolution as well as treaty obligations with NATO. It is both of these arguments that are most likely to erupt into major controversy for Obama. A significant number of legislators maintain that compliance with UN resolutions in effect negates the Constitutional mandates in re the use of military forces and places de facto employment authority in an international body. This argument REALLY gets the blood boiling in many.
So...in my view....Obama is walking a very narrow and tenuous tightrope w/r the WPR and Libya.
One way around the Resolution may well lie in transferring certain force elements to detached duty under control of the CIA. Certainly, there is ample precedent for such a move, the Ravens in SEA, SOG, and numerous other SOF engagements, totally outside of the auspices of DoD.
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