Yesterday we talked with Donald Rumsfeld and heard him justify why we no longer need to declare war.
This morning we talked about how you can't pick and choose what parts of the Constitution you like and don't like. If you choose to give the president the power to unilaterally declare war, you also give the president the power to unilaterally pass healthcare reform, and unilaterally pass cap and trade and unilaterally pas tax hikes. It's a package deal.
Here is why James Madison in 1793 on why the Congress declares war and not the president:
"In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace."
Which brings us to the genius of the Constitution; the Constitution will never be out of date because it controls the one thing that will never change: human nature.
It doesn't matter if today's military uses aircraft carriers and missiles, human nature has never changed, and the power declare war should still not be in the hands of the president.
http://media.worldnow.com/kfmbam/podcast/the_mike_slater_show_6225.mp3
Here is Congressman Abraham Lincoln writing against the Mexican-American War:
"The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us."
