Laws, Shmaws
Donald Trump and many of his supporters claim that the president had the authority to start a war on his own, as he has just done in the Middle East, under the War Powers Act of 1973. They seem to think that law was passed to enable the president, rather than Congress, to declare war. Quite the opposite is true.
The War Powers Act was passed at the end of our tragic, misguided, and criminal involvement in Vietnam. Its intention was to prevent such a thing from happening again. Here are three of its provisions:
The Act requires the president to consult with Congress “in every possible instance” before committing any violently hostile acts against a foreign power. Clearly, Trump broke the law on this one.
The law requires the president in every case of hostile action to notify the Congress within 48 hours. I’ll just guess, here, that the John Roberts court will figure news accounts of the war should have been sufficient for those silly people on Capitol Hill. To be fair, the so-called Gang of 8 did receive a notification, but not the entire Congress, and after that occurred, Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia said the administration had presented no evidence of an imminent threat from Iran.
The Act further requires that, without authorization from Congress, any military action must cease within 30 days. Trump refuses to even speculate on how long this one will last, but a month? Come on.
Obviously, in an age of intercontinental ballistic missiles, it is necessary to give someone emergency war powers. But the law is intended, not to expand or augment the president’s ability to use such power, but to severely limit that ability. The key point, of course, is that the only emergency in the instant case is the one created by Trump himself by launching an illegal and unconstitutional attack on behalf of his rogue counterpart in Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.
But, you might say, that silly law is 50-some years old and no president has taken it seriously, and besides, there’s a lot of debate about whether it makes any sense or is, itself, constitutional. You’d be right. You could say the same things, though, about a lot of our laws — laws governing elections, for example.
This particular president has very little use for law. Oh, he can use it sometimes for the summary arrest and life imprisonment, without trial, of people who committed the misdemeanor offense of entering the country without passports. But his emotional development, halted somewhere in early adolescence, doesn’t permit him to acknowledge laws that affect his own whims. He has 34 felony convictions to prove that. He likes to blow things up, and he’s never seen a stop sign he wouldn’t like to blast through. Laws are for the little people.
We are a nation of laws or we are not. At this moment, the law is a remarkably flexible instrument, bending willy-nilly to the caprice of a madman. If that were not so, we would not be sending soldiers and sailors to kill and to die without reason.
Wasn’t the Ayatollah Khamenei a bad guy who killed a bunch of his own people, though? Yeah. So is Vladimir Putin. So are many despots around the globe. Israel was in danger? It always is, and Israel’s own behavior has a good deal to do with that fact. There is no reason in law or in fact to support or sponsor this carnage. We have become as bellicose as almost any empire in world history.
That’s America for you, now. Hooray for the red, white, and blue. Especially the blood red.