Let the president decide

As I listened to the back and forth over President Obama’s plan to send more than 30,000 fresh troops to Afghanistan, I kept having the same thought over and over: thank goodness it wasn’t my job to decide what to do with this mess. I’m not defending or attacking the strategy the president has decided to follow, I’m just saying that I have no idea what to do in Afghanistan and I’m not that sure anyone really does.

Just try to picture yourself sitting in the president’s seat and having to make a call on how to proceed with this operation. You either ramp up the conflict as the military strategists suggest, thereby guaranteeing that many more Americans will lose their lives, or you pull up stakes and leave the country to the devices of the same nuts that blew up the World Trade Center back in 2001. Talk about a no-win situation.

Of course this is the kind of decision you sign up for when you run for president, right? Perhaps. But, on second thought, I seem to remember from way back in my American Government class that it is really supposed to be congress’ responsibility to declare war, not the president. So why does it seem to be completely up to the president to decide where we fight, and for how long?

That is, of course, a tricky question. It’s true that only congress can declare war, but it is also true that the executive branch has, over the years, acquired the authority to send a lot of soldiers off to fight on foreign shores for long periods of time without officially declaring a war. And congress has largely gone along with the idea.

Back in 1973, as we were still reeling from the effects of that little undeclared war in Vietnam, Congress tried to clarify and restrict the president’s power to commit our armed forces to a conflict by passing the War Powers Resolution. It limited the president’s authority to send troops into harm’s way for more than 60 days without a declaration of war or a (more nebulous) congressional authorization of the use of military force. It obviously left the president with a lot of leeway.

As you might be aware, congress never issued a declaration of war for the conflicts in Iraq or Afghanistan. They may seem like wars with all the shooting and blowing things up and people getting killed, but according to our government we are not formally at war. Congress did issue very broad “authorizations of the use of force” prior to the launching of those campaigns, but they left it up to the executive branch to work out all the unpleasant details.

For a person with my limited mental capacity, that seems an awful lot like they are following neither the letter nor the spirit of the Constitution’s specific delegation of the power to declare war to the legislative branch. Congress is supposed to decide when the military option is warranted and the president, as commander-in-chief, is supposed to decide how to best achieve our military goals once the fight is joined.

It doesn’t seem to me as if things are working that way right now. It is clearly the president’s show, and congress will rubber stamp whatever plan comes out of the White House. It’s just one of many examples of how the legislative branch seems to have ceded a power that the Constitution specifically enumerated to it over to an increasingly powerful executive branch.

Seeing as how they still control the purse strings, congress could easily take control of the matter at any time. But they won’t. Like me, they don’t want to have that decision weighing on their shoulders, nor do they wish to face the consequences should the decision not pan out. And as long as they can keep ignoring the Constitution, there’s no reason why should burden th