It’s a matter of long-settled constitutional practice that the president’s role as Commander-in-Chief gives him the effective power to wage war more or less as he sees fit, subject only to the constraining power of the Congress’s control over the purse strings.
The point of seeking a congressional resolution authorizing military action is get the Congress on record behind some relatively specific policy. The meat of the proposed ‘use of force’ resolution the president sent to Congress today says ..
The president is authorized to use all means that he determines to be appropriate, including force, in order to enforce the United Nations Security Council resolutions referenced above, defend the national security interests of the United States against the threat posed by Iraq, and restore international peace and security in the region.
That language is broad. And it’s vague. It authorizes the president to use force to enforce UN resolutions and do various, but unspecified, other good things in the Middle East. The vagueness of the language is deepened by the fact that president’s policy seems to have been in complete disarray for several days.
The long and the short of it is that this resolution doesn’t really mean anything. It gives the president the power he already has and puts the Congress on record behind no particular policy.
More thoughts on all this in a piece running this evening in Salon.
