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Edited on Tue Jan-30-07 01:02 PM by Peace Patriot
This is what the Constitution is all about. Curtailing presidential war powers. 1) Congress and ONLY Congress declares war. And, 2) Congress and ONLY Congress holds the purse-strings for war.
In the European monarchies, the monarch could endlessly drain the resources of both nobles and ordinary citizens, and of course their lifeblood, for wars to enhance the power and glory of the monarch--until of course somebody rebelled, which happened from time to time. The Russian Tsar at the turn of the 19th/20th century is a recent example of it. More than anything else, the Russian revolution was sparked by Tsarist wars--and the endless bloodshed and drain on the treasury, in a "power and glory" contest among the royal rulers of Europe (WWI). But that late example was preceded by centuries of the same. And when the American colonies rebelled against King George, the power of the king to make war was THE most important matter that they wanted to address, in that revolutionary document, the U.S. Constitution, which SEVERELY curtailed those powers of the president and made them subject to the will of the people, as expressed through Congress.
Our "King George' has a long lineage in out-of-control monarchs, draining blood and treasure for his own power and glory. The trick of the old monarchs, of course, was to convince the taxpayers and the cannon fodder that glory wars were in their interest--that people should identify their land and welfare with the king. And this was sometimes true. Nobles, knights and sometimes even peons benefited from the king's wars. But often they didn't, and would have preferred peace with whoever the king was picking a fight with. And here was the crux: how to achieve peace in the old system, when the king and the land were one, and the king taxed the people as his right, and mustered and commanded soldiers as his right, and issued decrees and declared war as his right, and all, including nobles, were obliged to provide financial support and soldiers in obedience to the rights of the king. Thus rebellions occurred, time and again--and institutions like parliaments and king's councils were created--in order to insure that the king's MILITARY power was used wisely and with general consent. And the tug of war ensued between the people's political power and the king's "rights"--which ultimately resulted in the American Revolution. The American Revolution established the PEOPLE as the SOVEREIGN. Not the President. The PEOPLE. We are the king!
This was UNPRECEDENTED in human history. That is why it bears the name "revolutionary." The PEOPLE are the SOVEREIGNS in the United States of America. WE declare war, if war is necessary. WE decide when and if our interests need to be defended. WE control the use of our taxes, and can deny the President funds especially and critically for discretionary war--which is the MAJOR monarchical power that the Founders of our republic were determined to curtail.
Several things have pushed our political system to the brink of tyranny: The president has become increasingly king-like over the last 4-5 decades, with the discovery of nuclear power and development of nuclear weapons. This gives the president (the "king") absolute power of life and death over the entire human race. Whatever the powers of even the worst tyrants of history, NO ONE has ever held such power before. And our democracy is cracking and crumbling under that burden. The Founders could not have imagined it, and of course provided no legal framework to deal with it. One man--ONE MAN!--can unleash a holocaust such as history has never seen. The end of all life on earth. And we've been damned lucky--is what we've been--first of all that Hitler didn't get "the bomb," and that that power fell into the hands of relatively sane men, and secondly, that it hasn't been used since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I won't get into the Hiroshima discussion here. Setting that aside as the dreadful end to WW II, it is something of a miracle, considering the tensions between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in the 1950s and 1960s, that we haven't blown ourselves all to hell. And now we know, with more sophisticated nukes, that it wouldn't take much--just a limited use of them--to put a black cloud over the planet that would kill all life on earth forevermore. (Read Carl Sagan's "The Cold and the Dark.")
But what all this does is create an atmosphere of REVERENCE around the presidency that it was never intended to have. It places a burden on democracy like no other. The president is a king by virtue of the weaponry that he commands. In the design of the republic, the president was SUPPOSED TO BE just one man, one citizen, one human being among many. He was never supposed to be a holder of untoward power of any kind, let alone absolute power over all life on earth.
And the other burden on democracy over the last 4-5 decades is the very success of American democracy in creating prosperity and accumulating wealth, which has led to the accumulation of vast, king-like wealth in the hands of a few fabulously rich CEOs and others--our Corporate Rulers--in huge multinational consortiums that now control our government, our news media and, last but not least, our election system (quite literal control--the use of "trade secret," proprietary programming code to "count" all our votes, with virtually no audit/recount controls--something ELSE that our Founders could not have imagined). Further, as a result of our success in WW II, and our failure to demobilize afterwards, these Corporate Rulers are also, by and large, war profiteers. They feed on war, and have been MANUFACTURING war, to remain profitable (feeding off our taxes) since Vietnam, at least. They are no longer the mere farmers and traders that our republic was designed to govern. They are monarchies in and of themselves, with vast wealth and power that is no longer being used in the interests of the citizens of the U.S., and has no loyalty to anyone or anything, and is driven by pure greed. Yet another development that our Founders could not have imagined, as to its magnitude--although they were, indeed, worried about corporate business power. Jefferson wanted to curtail it in the Constitution, but yielded to the argument that the then powerful individual states--entities closer to the people--would control business consortiums. And, in fact, they did--to a point. For instance, the Railroad Barons were curtailed by a populist revolt in California. But it took federal power to curtail the banks and capitalists/investors after the Great Crash (power exercised by FDR and Congress). And "trust busting"--busting up monopolies--has generally required strong federal power and a strong president. And when the Corporatists took over the federal government--with Reagan--the battle was over. Jefferson had lost.
So, now, basically what we have is a president with the fate of the earth directly in his hands--a king, nay, Earth's Emperor--controlled by vastly powerful corporate war profiteers who have loyalty to no one. And our Constitution--sturdy as it has been, over the centuries--and our democracy, are reeling under the pressure.
To curtail the power of the "president," at this point, is to tamper with the RELIGIOUS atmosphere around Earth's Emperor, and with the powerful and immensely dangerous corporate war profiteers who are using the Emperor as their tool.
The Constitution says: 1) Congress and ONLY Congress declares war. And, 2) Congress and ONLY Congress holds the purse-strings for war. Will it hold?
The Iraq War Resolution (IWR) needs to be rescinded, first of all. This was an unconstitutional grant of authority to Bush to make war. Congress should never have passed it. Either we are at war, or not--on a vote of Congress, which, theoretically (Diebold/ES&S vote "counting" notwithstanding) represents the People, the theoretical SOVEREIGN. Not Bush. The People!
Secondly, all war funding should be withdrawn, retroactively, because Bush ABUSED the authority that was wrongfully given to him. We did not need to go to war. He lied about it!
Thirdly, we need to take a real hard look at our military budget. What is this vast military machine FOR? Defense? When was the last time the "Defense" Department actually defended us? They couldn't even defend the nation's capitol on 9/11! They couldn't even defend the Pentagon, for godssakes? We need to cut the military budget by about 90%, down to a true defensive posture. No more wars of choice!
Fourthly, nuclear disarmament. No one--NO ONE!--should hold this power over all human life. Democracy is not possible in this circumstance. Our democracy has been crumbling and falling--just as surely as the Roman Empire crumbled and fell--ever since we acquired this power. Enough! Fini! Get rid of these weapons--everywhere! If we must fight, let's do it with spears and clubs. At least, then, we insure that future generations of human beings will in fact exist, to keep clubbing each other over the head.
To enact 1, 2, 3 and 4, we need 5 (which really should have been first): TRANSPARENT elections!
This is WHY the Corporate Rulers took over our election system with secretly coded electronic voting machines: To "re-elect" a War President and manufacture a phony endorsement for his illegal and unjust war. It's as plain as it could be, if you know the story of how this occurred (and how quickly it occurred--fast-tracked with a $3.9 billion electronic voting boondoggle, between 2002 and 2004). Americans are the most potentially powerful voters on earth. They HAD to control our votes, because WE have the SOVEREIGN power to CURTAIL them. Halliburton, Bechtel, Lockheed, Exxon-Mobile, Faux News--all U.S. based corporations. WE can pull their charters. WE can bust up their monopolies, and seize their assets for the public good. We, the sovereign people of the United States.
Our sovereignty is what is being debated in these hearings by Senator Feingold. It's not really a complicated legal issue. It's very simple. Will the Constitution, the document that implements our sovereignty--our founding document--hold? Or will it end up not being worth the hemp paper that it's written on?
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