Reason #24: The War on Congress’ Power to Declare War

Just because George W. Bush liked to brag about being “the CEO president” and the “ultimate decision maker” doesn’t mean he was solely responsible for the executive branch’s modern dominance. For decades, the White House has been grabbing power from the other two branches like a schoolyard bully stealing their lunch money.

One of the most important responsibilities Congress has given up in recent years is the use of our military. The president, as Bush liked to remind us, is “Commander in Chief” of our armed forces. But Article One, Section Eight of the Constitution says in no uncertain terms that only Congress has the power “To declare war.”

… Presidents act like kings and the people’s Congressional representatives act like his vassals.

Yet, despite the Constitution’s plain-as-day language on who gets to send our troops into battle, presidents constantly dispatch our military without an official declaration of war. And instead of fulfilling its sacred Constitutional duty, Congress either stands by and lets it happen - as when Bill Clinton bombed Serbia in the 1990s - or gives a vague, namby-pamby “authorization” to use the military.

Those “authorizations” are supposed to be limited in scope, but the executive branch uses them to run wild. In 1964, for instance, Congress passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, which gave Lyndon Johnson’s Democratic administration the power to “assist” Vietnam against “communist aggression.” But this assistance turned out to be the decade long Vietnam War, one of the bloodiest and most expensive conflicts in our history.

More recently, Bush turned Congress’s “authorization for the use of military force” against Iraq into a carte-blanche excuse to spend trillions of dollars and years upon years in a Vietnam-like quagmire. Both of these tragic, undeclared wars are examples of what happens when presidents act like kings and the people’s Congressional representatives act like his vassals.

NEXT: Reason #25: Presidential Signing Statements - The Arrogance of Unchecked Power