this is Boehner trying to score political points, do a little political CYA, and that's all it is.

Does Congress need to revisit all the ways in which military force is pre-authorized? Oh yeah. Definitely. But frankly, republicans love it when we drop bombs on Muslim villagers out collecting firewood and cars containing Muslim wedding parties. So do too many democrats. However, when appropriation bills come up, Boehner and his cronies will kill Medicare (they already voted to do so in the House); they may cut taxes on corporations (even though 60% of them pay no income taxes anyways - C corporations, mind you, not S corporations); they may cut education and tuition subsidies (but NOT farming subsidies); but they'll never come out for Pentagon budget cuts or any appropriation to fund the troops. Tacit authorization, and that's all the president needs.

And Boehner is late to this particular party. Dennis Kucinich was right out of the box on the lack of congressional consultation over Libya. I'm not sure he was correct either. See my comment below.

"Defense and security: In 2010, some 20 percent of the budget, or $705 billion, paid for defense and security-related international activities. The bulk of the hunter fans spending in this category reflects the underlying costs of the Department of Defense and other security-related activities. The total also includes the cost of supporting operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, which totaled $170 billion in 2010."

That's the same total spent on social security - 20%. I don't see legislators rushing to cut the funding of dropping bombs on and droning-out normal people in other countries. National security; starve your own citizens so you can have enough weaponry to toast your neighbors while you keep your snouts in the public trough.

I'll believe these guys are serious when I see them taking a significant pay cut to show how worried they are about the good of the country.

Congress voted on competing resolutions concerning the Libyan War and the War Powers Act. Kucinic's motion received 148 votes in favor -- it was a significant event. That is what I referred to.

The war in Afghanistan was authorized by the September 11 AUMF. Also covers the strikes in Yemen, Pakistan, occassionally Somalia, and a kidnapping, er, I can't remember the euphemism, in Italy.

(From Wikipedia) The Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists was one of two resolutions commonly known as "AUMF" (the other being "Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq Resolution of 2002"), was a joint resolution passed by the United States Congress on September 14, 2001, authorizing the use of United States Armed Forces against those responsible for the attacks on September 11, 2001. The authorization granted the President the authority to use all "necessary and appropriate force" against those whom he determined "planned, authorized, committed or aided" the September 11th attacks, or who harbored said persons or groups. The AUMF was signed by President George W. Bush on September 18, 2001.

Whether he needs it is a different question, but on September 14, 2001, Congress passed the AUMF for the war on terror.

"That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

Al Qaeda is an organization, as is the Taliban. US forces in Afghanistan are fighting Taliban, US drones in Yemen and Pakistan are fighting Al Qaeda. Re-reading the AUMF, post-Abbotabad, the President is authorized to bomb Islamabad and Rawalpindi, if he finds that the ISI and Pakistani Army "harbored" Bin Laden.

"Why are Predator drones in Yemen lawful but F-18s in Libya illegal? "

Strikes on AQ anywhere in the world, with the exception (maybe) of US territory, are authorized by Congress under the AUMF passed on September 14, 2001.

A different AUMF was required for Iraq because the Administration did not (officially) claim that Saddam Hussein was connected to 9/11.

Let's be honest, the president can send U.S. troops wherever he wants whenever he wants. The War Powers act requires him to get congessional approval after 60 days. If he doesn't then he is in violation of the law. He isn't going to be arrested. He isn't going to be fined. Congress will complain and pout for awhile and then, most likely, move on. Worst case scenario they don'y and instead decide to impeach the president. It's doubtful the house would go that far. Party politics being what it is it's even more doubtful that the senate would convict him. But that is ultimately (with alot of 'ifs' involved) where this could go.

The ridiculous thing, to me at least, with this whole situation is that I doubt anyone would be objecting to ousting Qaddafi. The leadership of both parties in the House are behind President Obama, as are all the hawks on both aisles of the Senate. If he had followed the rules, we'd still be in the same position, the only difference being the Kucinich-Paul types wouldn't have an argument against it. It's more of an optics problem than actual policy problem: if Obama had at least given lip service to the War Powers Resolution and gone to Congress during the 60 day window, he'd have cut off criticism before it began.

To understand why the War Powers Act is a extra-constitutional nuisance and monstrosity, and needs to be repealed, we must understand the nature of Executive war-making power. Let us look for a moment at the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution of 1964, which was, as we shall see, the progenitor of the War Powers Act of 1973.

Though not a formal declaration of war, the resolution was a de facto declaration in that it gave the President full authority for the conduct of the war. When the Vietnam War became unpopular many members of Congress asserted, among other things, that they had not known what they were voting for, that there had been no real debate on it, and that Johnson had misled Congress into voting for the resolution. Thus, members of Congress contended, Johnson had misled the Congress and America into the Vietnam War.

These arguments will not stand up. Barring the excuse of illiteracy, members of Congress could not have been unaware of what they were voting for and the resolution was debated a full eight hours in the Senate. As to being misled, while there has been controversy, yet fully unresolved, over the second attack on the USS Maddox in the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident, the controversy itself misses the point. America did not go to war in Vietnam because of the Gulf of Tonkin incident. It had already been involved in the war for several years supporting the government of South Vietnam in resisting the aggression from the North. The Tonkin Resolution merely gave the President the full Congressional authority to use military force in assisting the South Vietnamese as he saw fit whenever it should become necessary, as it did in 1965 when Johnson ordered the first large deployment of troops in Vietnam. If there had been no Gulf of Tonkin incident Johnson would simply have come before Congress in 1965 to ask for a resolution granting him the authority to escalate our involvement and send troops to help support South Vietnam. Given the overwhelming bipartisan support in Congress and the public for the war in 1965, there is not the slightest reason to doubt that Congress would have given Johnson in 1965 everything they had given him in 1964. Bottom line: Congress and the American people were not misled into the Vietnam War.

I have dilated a bit on the Gulf of Tonkin resolution to illustrate an important point: that the Johnson and Nixon administrations both conducted the Vietnam War within Constitutional parameters and legality, thus rendering the passage of the War Powers Act in 1973 to be a partisan and completely unnecessary intrusion on the prerogatives of the Executive by then-Democrats in congress. It was an astonishing emasculation of Executive power. It posed a solution to a problem that did not even exist. The real political problems faced by Congress in America's conduct of the Vietnam War in the early seventies then, was not in the constitution, but in the war's long duration and current unpopularity. Like many in the media who had once supported the war, prominent lawmakers like Senator Fullbright, who steered the Tonkin Resolution through the Senate in 1964, and Senator Church, both of whom were strong, vocal supporters of the war in 1965, now needed to absolve themselves from the taint of an unpopular war they had once supported when it was popular to do so. They found a scapegoat: the Presidency. The President, they said, had lied the nation into war and exceeded his Constitutional mandate. (Sound familiar?) Therefore, they argued, Congress must pass a resolution constraining the President's executive authority lest we have more Vietnams. Of course, this completely ignored the fact that Congress had supported the war with a resolution that, at the time, had overwhelming Congressional and popular approval, and that Congress had been consulted by the White House and the military on the war all along. The problem, as they were surely well aware, was in the now-unpopular war they had once strongly supported, not in the passage of the Tonkin Resolution or the constitution.

The War Powers Act was thus conceived in a welter of cynical, partisan maneuvering and gamesmenship. It allowed Democrats to scapegoat the war on to the Presidency, to emasculate the power of the Executive in favor of Congress, and publicly humiliate the long-hated President Nixon, all in one stroke. How agreeable to combine duty with sport; the Democrats could thus have their fun subverting the Constitution for wholly spurious and nakedly partisan reasons, all under the guise of being it's stout defenders. How convenient. In retrospect, the WP Resolution, I think, can be seen as an overreaction to the Vietnam War in the same way that the Independent Council Statute, which was to so torment the Reagan, Bush Sr., and Clinton Administrations, was an overreaction to Watergate. The court, in Berk v. Laird (1970) rejected charges that the war was unconstitutionally conducted by either the Johnson or Nixon Administrations.

Of course, the real consequences of Congress's neutering of Executive power would not be suffered by Americans but by the peoples of Indochina. Months after signing the Peace Accords in 1973, Nixon found his ability to enforce the treaty and respond to North Vietnam's violations of the Accords hamstrung by Congressional Democrats, who, intent on exploiting Nixon's self-inflicted embroilment in Watergate, passed the WP Resolution over his veto. Now, with anti-war Democrats controlling American foreign policy, began one of the most shameful episodes in our history as a nation: the slow strangulation of American aid to the peoples of Cambodia and South Vietnam and our utter abandonment of them to the tyranny and genocide that we had fought eight years and sacrificed 58,000 lives to prevent. Some several hundred thousand South Vietnamese would perish in concentration camps and on the high seas, and some 1-2 million Cambodians would be killed in one of the worst Communist-engineered genocides of the 20th century. Yet, here for all to see, was the "peace" that the media, the Peace Movement, and pro-war hawks-now turned anti-war Democrat doves like William Fullbright, Ted Kennedy, and George McGovern had labored so long and hard to bring about.

All of which illustrates the perils of excessive Congressional control over military and foreign policy decisions that the founders had wisely put in the Executive. Even worse has been the Democrats cynical and highly selective invocations of the WP Act for partisan purposes in the courts, often with the help of liberal academics and the ACLU. In 1982 Congressmen sued to stop the Reagan Administration from sending aid to El Salvador and sued to challenge the constitutionality of the 1983 Grenada operation in 1984. In 1987 110 Congressmen sued to stop Reagan from, of all things, providing armed escorts to oil tankers traveling in the Persian Gulf. In 1990 53 congressmen sued Bush Sr. in federal court because he had not yet received congressional approval for the Gulf War. The results of these legal crusades has been one of abject failure: the legal basis for these claims has been so weak that the federal courts have refused to even hear them, and the Supreme Court has never ruled on the constitutionality of the War Powers Act. Of course, no Congressional Democrats ever sued the Clinton Administration for its deployments and military actions in Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Iraq, Sudan and Afghanistan in 1998, and Kosovo in 1999, not to mention peacekeeping missions in Rwanda and Macedonia. All of which were conducted without congressional authorization, by the way.

All of which underscores the hypocritical and partisan character of the WP Act and its dubious constitutionality. It unconstitutionally usurps powers that the founders properly invested in the executive, not congress. It is implausible in theory and, as we have seen, unworkable and selectively applied in practice. It should be repealed.

The notion of Congressional control of war making powers is undermined by history. The pattern of Executive conduct of military interventions since the founding of the Republic in 1788 have always favored strong executive initiative and leadership. Of the 100 military interventions since 1788, only five have been sanctioned with a formal declaration of war, though many, like the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, were sanctioned with a conditional declaration of Congressional authorization. Unlike post-Vietnam Congressional Democrats, the Framers had a flexible view of the allocation of war powers and the practice of Presidents and Congress since the founding has only served to support the exercise of strong Executive powers. Alexander Hamilton described the powers of the Presidency as short of the powers of a British king. Yet, I think it would be a mistake to forget that Hamilton was also an advocate for strong executive leadership in time of war, saying "The direction of war implies the direction of the common strength, and the power of directing and employing the common strength forms a usual and essential part in the definition of executive authority." This should be done by presidents, he said, because they alone can act with "decision, activity, and dispatch" and "energy in the executive is a leading character in the definition of good government. It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks."

The Framers, while suspicious of excessive power in the Executive, thus instinctively understood that war conducted by Congressional fiat was an invitation to chaos and insecurity. As Madison said to Patrick Henry "The sword is in the hands of the British king; the purse is in the hands of the Parliament. It is so in America, as far as any analogy can exist." The genius of the constitution then, is that it brilliantly and flexibly favors strong executive leadership that is checked and balanced by Congress's power of the purse. It does not need the WP Resolution to disrupt and derail this eminently wise and sensible state of affairs.

President Bush, unlike Obama, prudently obtained full Congressional authorization for both the Afghan and Iraq wars. Obama's intervention, confused and scattershot though it is, is somewhat more dubious in that he is still denying that we are at war at all in Libya and are rather involved in some sort of limited intervention that is just short of war. Whatever. The relevant point is that there is ample historical and constitutional precedent for his intervention in Libya, whether he thinks it is a war or not. None of which, however, excuses his failure to consult Congress in the meantime and failing to address the American people about this intervention with anything like a modicum of clarity, candor, or leadership.

In any event, the President continues to demean himself and his office by these too-clever-by-half tendentious assertions about how he is in compliance with the WP Act, when he clearly is not. The assertion, contained in his 38-page explication of his position that US war operations in Libya “do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces,” has been met with a mix of incredulity and bipartisan ridicule. The President should put an end to this charade, and seek a showdown over the Constitutionality of the WP Act. He would, in my opinion, surely win, and deserve to.

This post should probably be dissected by a psychiatrist more than anything, but the line about 2/3 of military contractors are foreigners is a nice aha moment. Really? You mean we hire locals to do menial jobs on the base as opposed to paying an American twenty times as much? The horror!

"TEN Generations of Americans cannot pay the 2011 national debt,"

Our current national debt (as % of GDP) is less than our debt at the end of WWII. We paid that one down to manageable levels inside one generation.

dunno how that happened.

Anyways. The WPR specifies that prior congressional authorization for the use of military force suffices to allow the president to deploy, and the UN participation Act of 1945 provides such authorization. As amended, the president need only declare that US national interests are being served. Originally, the UNPA gave the president blanket authority to support UNSC authorizations of force, but like I say, as amended the president can claim national interest. And give the orders.

After Iraq, you'd think they'd have rethought all that. Certainly, I'm not at all happy with UNSC/NATO's performance diplomatically over Libya. I remember when the thing was supposed to be a no-fly zone, but I seem to be the only one who does.

From the point of view of US law, the UN Resolutions on Iraq meant a whole lot less than the AUMF that Congress passed in September 2002.

what actions the president may see fit to take, only that he declare the action to be in the national interest. No matter what every president since Nixon has claimed, Congress knows full well that they want no part of actually limiting whatever military options the Pentagon deems desirable or necessary.

The AUMF in Iraq gave Bush whatever domestic legal cover he needed for his war of aggression, and the UN Participation Act of 1945 seems to give Obama the same, even as amended. Indeed, the justification published by Justice makes certain to mention in its very first paragraph that they in the white house feel this is in the national interest, and that's all the amended act requires. As originally passed, this wasn't even required. A blanket approval of US military deployments in support of UNSC resolutions was given by Congress back in 1945.

It's all political anyways. Almost nobody in Congress will have the guts to seem to be standing up for Muammar Qadhafi, and that's where the bottom line will be drawn. The political fallout will be because the Obama Pentagon has finally overreached, though it took Congress long enough to figure that out, after the continuing mission in Iraq (and the shift to contractors ostensibly under State's control), the escalation in Afghanistan, the expansion of the GWOT and the continuing operations in North Yemen.

I said before that almost nobody in Congress will be caught defending Qadhafi, but this was wrong. Seemingly, they won't be caught dead standing up for anything Muslim. state or individual. I don't see how the claim that we're not at war with Islam stands up.

Meanwhile, the military operations Khartoum has been preparing for the last two years have finally been launched in Kordofan, and the US will be unable, politically, to do anything about it.

Obama picked the wrong fight.

I don't think that the Administration has cited the UNPA of 1945 and 1949, first of all.

Second, the UNPA of 1945 has two parts that are relevant:
"SEC. 6.
The President is authorized to negotiate a special agreement or agreements with the Security Council which shall be subject to the approval of the Congress by appropriate Act or joint resolution providing for the numbers and types of armed forces, their degree of readiness and general location, and the nature of facilities and assistance, including rights of passage, to be made available to the Security Council on its call for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security in accordance with article 43 of said Charter"

I think that, boiled down, that means, "The POTUS is authorized to negotiate a Special Agreement with UNSEC which shall be subject to the approval of Congress by Act or JR providing for placing US forces at the Security Council’s disposal." I don't think that such a Special Agreement ever got negotiated, or approved by Congress. However, I could be very very wrong.

The second relevant part says:
"The POTUS is authorized to negotiate a Special Agreement with UNSEC which shall be subject to the approval of Congress by Act or JR providing for placing US forces at the Security Council’s disposal."

I read that as saying, "The POTUS is pre-authorized to place US forces at UNSEC’s disposal, Provided that this is limited to those in the Special Agreement." POTUS does not just have carte blanche to send whatever units he chooses without Congressional authorization.

It sounds to me that the 1945 UN Participation Act envisioned a US contribution to a UN expeditionary force that never got assembled.

The 1949 Amendments say that POTUS may detail up to 1000 US troops to the UN as observers, guards or other non-combat roles.

SEC. 6. The President is authorized to negotiate a special agreement or agreements with the Security Council which shall be subject to the approval of the Congress by appropriate Act or joint resolution providing for the numbers and types of armed forces, their degree of readiness and general location, and the nature of facilities and assistance, including rights of passage, to be made available to the Security Council on its call for the purpose of maintaining international peace and security in accordance with article 43 of said Charter. The President shall not be deemed to require the authorization of the Congress to make available to the Security Council on its call in order to take action under article 42 of said Charter and pursuant to such special agreement or agreements the armed forces, facilities, or assistance provided for therein: Provided, That nothing herein contained shall be construed as an authorization to tile President by the Congress to make available to the Security Council for such purpose armed forces, facilities, or assistance in addition to the forces, facilities, and assistance provided for in such special agreement or agreements.

http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/decad031.asp

the impunity factor.

Post-Parl Harbor, the US was able to build up and eventually provide enough force to strike back at Japanese forces anywhere in the Pacific with impunity.

Now, however, Libya's ability to strike at US forces anywhere with any sort of impunity is non-existant. Therefore, its not a war, so much as a smackdown on a petty dictator, that somehow started out as simply a no-fly zone, with tomohawks and bombs and destruction and... where does it end?

I do like this analogy. For all those "not at war" sayers, this is a pretty funny, and dirty, reply. Well done.