I recall when then-President Barack Obama was planning to send troops to enforce his “Assad must go” policy in Syria, many Republican US Senators passionately argued that the US President must come to Congress for approval before sending US troops into combat overseas. At the time, they portrayed themselves as brave defenders of the US Constitution.
Last week, when the Senate held a vote to remind President Trump that he is required to seek approval from the Legislative Branch before launching an attack on Venezuela, only two Republican Senators stood up to defend the Constitution. Why? Perhaps because a Republican President was now in office.
According to Politico, war-enthusiast Senator Lindsey Graham went so far as to say that Congress can’t “substitute our judgment” for the president’s when it comes to the decision to attack Venezuela.
The Senator needs a refresher course in high school civics. The US Constitution requires Congress, as the branch most directly accountable to the people, to substitute its judgement for the president’s when it comes to warmaking!
We fought a war against George III to negate the ability of a king to take the people to war on his whim. Now, Congress scrambles to abrogate that hard-fought achievement in the name of political expediency.
While the DC foreign policy blob – made up of both parties – is always pro-war, with each election we get a charade that one party or the other is standing up for the Constitution by challenging a president of the other party on war powers.
Why not stand up for the Constitution regardless of who the President may be?
The truth is, these days most Members of the House and Senate hold their heads down, follow their leadership, and enjoy that 97 percent incumbency reelection rate. After all, making waves by standing up for the Constitution can cost you your seat. You might even find yourself in a position where a President from your own party raises millions of dollars to try and get you ousted.
In an excellent recent essay in The American Conservative, George O’Neill Jr. recounts the current round of pro-war lies being bandied about to gin up support for a war on Venezuela. There are “narco-terrorists” threatening the US! Hezbollah is training in the Venezuelan jungles! Maduro is in league with Hamas!
We’ve heard it all before. The sinking of the USS Maine. The “domino theory.” Babies ripped from Kuwaiti incubators by Saddam’s stormtroopers. WMDs. Assad’s gas attacks. And so on.
All lies, and as O’Neill writes, the interventions they spawned have all turned out to be devastating, expensive failures. We’ve gone from six trillion dollars in debt at the beginning of the war on terror to 38 trillion dollars today. The global US military empire cannot continue if we want to keep our country.
Benjamin Franklin famously said “a republic if you can keep it” when asked what kind of government the Framers of our Constitution had created. But the Republic cannot be held together by magic or good luck. “If you can keep it,” means representation by men and women of good moral character who put the interests of their constituents and their country before their political party or the President. And it requires a population willing to stand up to propaganda and politics to elect such good people and hold them to account.
