Obama Has Until Friday And Then What?

From the Washington Times:

Stepping up a simmering constitutional conflict, House Speaker John A. Boehner warned President Obama on Tuesday that unless he gets authorization from Congress for his military deployment in Libya, he will be in violation of the War Powers Resolution.

The big question is, If Obama doesn’t get support by Friday, what is Boehner going to do?  If we were following the Constitution, we’d be impeach Obama for this. But, we’d also have impeached every President from Truman on who committed U.S. Troops to battle without a clear Declaration of War as required by the Constitution.

Instead, we have a situation where we’ve tried to kind of follow the Constitution to make up for the fact that we live in a world where the President must sometimes act due to the fact that we’re no longer fighting 18th century wars and speed is of the essence. The War Powers Act requires the President get a resolution authorizing the use of force within 60 days of going in. The President hasn’t tried to do that and isn’t going to as he knows that there’s no way Congress will sign off on it. So, the President is thumbing his nose at the law.

Congress only has one recourse in this case when dealing with a lawless President, and that is Impeachment. However, the option is untenable for many reasons. Not, the least of these is that Bill Clinton also violated the War Powers Act and was not impeached. Though in that case, Clinton had just been impeached and the House Managers had been told by that great Statesman and advocate of justice, Ted Stevens, “I don’t care if you can prove he raped a woman, stood her up and shot her, you’re not going to  get 67 votes.”  This was slightly discouraging to taking another go at it.

Still, the bar has been set so low, unconstitutionally that illegally committing U.S. Troops to war and making a mockery of laws you’re supposed to hold could hardly be considered impeachable. Indeed, there’s even some division among the GOP as many Republicans think it’s the President’s right as commander-in-chief to put our nation’s armed  forces into action any time he wants, and for however long he wants without pesky congressional approval. Such a notion would cause the Founders to roll over in their graves. It gives the President almost Imperial Authority with our nation’s troops to drag us into everyone else’ s wars. But there’s enough thought like that in the GOP Caucus to paralyze Boehner.

Also, thanks to the lack of the anti-war agitprop and media agitation we had during the Bush Administration, the public is barely aware of the campaign going on. Thus, the American people aren’t outraged because they haven’t been informed.

As such, Boehner is setting himself up to look foolish and ineffective. Republicans won’t cancel funding for an operation in progress, they won’t impeach the President, and they won’t force him to comply with the War Powers Act. Boehner’s policy on this seems to be, “Speak loudly and carry a small stick.”

One final note: After spending years listening to liberals rave about, “Bush’s illegal wars,”  I have to declare that the silence on Libya is deafening. Say what you want about Iraq and Afghanistan, but President Bush respected the law and got an authorization for the use of force from Congress before going in.  Apparently, liberals are only anti-war and only against “illegal wars” if a Republican is in power.

Read more at Adam’s Blog