Obama Tells Congress to Go to Hell

William Tecumseh Sherman was a Union army general in the United States Civil War, perhaps second in standing only to General, and later President, Ulysses S. Grant.

Sherman is remembered, especially in the state of Georgia, for his destructive “March to the Sea,” a decisive and needed 1864 victory for the North that likely clinched President Lincoln’s re-election.

History has recorded that Sherman, long before the invention of poison gas, was the first advocate of “Total War,” a punishing strategy that cut off enemy supplies, destroyed communications and produced among the people a true sense of the personal misery, terror and grief that accompanies war.

Sherman served as commanding general of the U.S. Army (1869 to1883) and in 1879 spoke to the graduating class of the Michigan Military Academy, warning against eagerness for combat.

The general who ordered the burning of Atlanta said: “I’ve been through two wars and I know. I’ve seen cities and homes in ashes. I’ve seen thousands of men lying on the ground, their dead faces looking up at the skies. It is only those who have neither fired a shot nor heard the shrieks and groans of the wounded who cry aloud for blood, more vengeance, more desolation. I tell you, war is Hell!”

President Barack Hussein Obama, are you listening?

As I write, muddled news reports from Washington, D.C. indicate that President Obama is prepared to order a U.S. military strike against Syria in retaliation for Syrian President Bashar Assad’s alleged, brutal use of poison gas against his own people.

It appears that the former community organizer from Chicago, two-year U.S. senator from Illinois, constant campaigner and now commander in chief of the U.S. armed forces, having drawn a rhetorical “red line” concerning Assad’s use of poison gas, is now planning war in order to avoid his own embarrassment.

Yesterday, the British Parliament rejected joining Obama’s war. Members of the U.S. Congress, the only American body with the constitutional power to declare war, are unconvinced about Obama’s plan, if indeed he has one.

Former United Nations Ambassador John Bolton said that President Obama has shown: “… amazing confusion in his own mind about what he thinks his objectives [in Syria] are.”

An NBC News poll shows that an overwhelming majority of Americans, roughly eight in 10, want the president to get approval from Congress before any attack on Syria. Few doubt that if Congress does vote, it will reject war.

Indeed, in 2008, then presidential candidate Senator Barack Obama said he believed no U.S. president has the power to order a military attack unilaterally. Then Senator Joe Biden went further, threatening to impeach President George W. Bush if he bombed Iran without approval from Congress.

I have previously described how President Obama has made himself a virtual dictator, ignoring his sworn oath to “faithfully execute the laws” and uphold the Constitution, his fast and loose treatment of the horrendous Obamacare law being a classic example.

The rule of law to Obama seems to echo the infamous opinion of the late mayor of Jersey City, Frank Hague: “I am the law.”

In an interview with CNN’s Chris Cuomo this week, Obama criticized the U.S. Congress for failing one of its “core responsibilities” in not passing a budget. (Mr. President, call your lapdog, Senator Harry Reid!)

Then, displaying his audacious contempt for Congress, Obama, a former professor of constitutional law, made this astounding claim: “Congress doesn’t have a whole lot of core responsibilities.”

The Constitution clearly indicates one power that Congress does have. Article One, section eight, grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war.

I agree with the 2008 stated opinion of Senator Obama: “The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.”

If our megalomaniacal president proceeds to attack Syria without congressional authorization, dragging us into who knows how wide a conflict, the U.S. Constitution, Article one, section two, clause five, provides an appropriate remedy: “The House of Representatives shall … have the sole Power of Impeachment.”

Faithfully yours,

Bob Bauman JD
Chairman, Freedom Alliance