THE STATEMENTS AT ISSUE:
“After careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike….That’s my judgment as commander in chief. But I’m also the president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy. So even though I possessed the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress.”
– President Barack Obama, Tuesday night in his speech to the nation on the military situation in Syria.
“Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, said the President believed a strike would be lawful, both in international law and domestic law, even if neither the [United Nations] Security Council nor Congress approved it. But the novel circumstances, she said, led Mr. Obama to seek Congressional concurrence to bolster its legitimacy.”
– As reported in The New York Times by staff reporter Charlie Savage, on September 8.
WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTION, AND…
Many Americans tend to assume that, for every major constitutional question, there is a definite constitutional answer. But, if the question is how much power a president, acting entirely on the powers of the presidential office alone, has to send the military into action, the simple answer is that there is no simple answer.
In this field of constitutional law, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ most-famous quote again becomes very useful: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.” During 226 years with the Constitution, Presidents have been working out equations on the extent of their war powers, and experience (more than constitutional text or logic) has determined the extent of that authority.
President Obama continued that exploration Tuesday night, making a bold claim that he could act on his own, but also suggesting that it was not appropriate to do so in the Syrian situation, at least as matters stand at this moment.
