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" It is a comforting -- and comfortable -- fiction to believe that the president&amp;#039;s decision to throw into the lap of the Congress at least part of the decision on whether or not to make war in Syria is also a deft political move that will, in effect, exploit the &amp;quot;gap&amp;quot; between the hawkish wing of the Republican party and the isolationist wing thereof, which is generally perceived to exist by people who egregiously violate the blog&amp;#039;s Five Minute Rule regarding any public statements made by any member of the Paul family. I happen to believe that much of the congressional resistance to what the president wants will come because this particular president wants it. I also happen to believe that, if the vote goes sour for him in the House, and the president lets the missiles fly anyway, you will see motions for his impeachment set aloft simultaneously. I don&amp;#039;t know what it will take to get the country&amp;#039;s punditocracy to realize the simple truth that even crazoid vandals believe what they say, and will do what they say they will do. However, there is a very real political gap here. Unfortunately, it is not one that the president can fully exploit, because to do so would be to be perceived as &amp;quot;weakening&amp;quot; the office of the presidency, and nobody can either be elected president, or act as president, on a platform of reducing the powers of the office. (Which is why Rand Paul is going to bob and weave on this question like a man pursued by bees.) Over the past 60 years, by a variety of strategies and through the simple cowardice of the national legislature, the war powers of the nation have leached into the Executive branch, never to return. This is a secret to approximately nobody. (In 1999, while I was working on a profile for this magazine, John McCain admitted quite frankly to me that this was the case.) This has been going on long enough for people to perceive this to be the constitutional status quo.  Hence, when the president announced that he was bringing Congress in on the decision to make war in Syria, a very loud howl arose from the Action Now! crowd that obeying even that most minimal of constitutional niceties -- and I say &amp;quot;niceties&amp;quot; because the Constitution requires that the power to make war in all cases resides in the Congress -- weakened not only his office, but the country itself, as though the United States had lost some kind of military advantage because its president is less free to act than is Bashar al-Assad. If you want to see a perfect example of this thinking, check out Tom Rogan, who thinks that the problem with consulting Congress is that Congress sucks. 2. It sets a dangerous precedent: Obama has just qualified the military authority of his office. This is seriously problematic. True, in any democracy, scrutiny of military operations is critical (as is legislative approval for major actions like those in Afghanistan and Iraq). Nevertheless, when it comes to the limited use of force, there&amp;#039;s an unassailable rationale for robust executive authority. In moments of crisis, military authority must avoid the polluting influence of partisan gamesmanship. Today&amp;#039;s House and Senate aren&amp;#039;t exactly citadels of Jeffersonian governing virtue. Often, though admittedly not always, Congress is home to narrowly opportunistic antics. It is a house both divided and angry. It&amp;#039;s no place for crisis management. As the founders warranted and today reaffirms, American foreign policy cannot function with 536 commanders-in-chief. There is so much wrong with this single paragraph that it&amp;#039;s hard to know where to start. &amp;quot;The polluting influence of partisan gamesmanship&amp;quot; is what a lot of us call democracy, as are, alas, &amp;quot;opportunistic antics.&amp;quot; (And, after the Iraq debacle, it takes a special kind of deafness to irony to talk about the Congress as being prone to &amp;quot;narrowly opportunistic antics&amp;quot; when it comes to the use of the American military.) Finally, do we really have to explain, again, that the president is commander-in-chief only of the armed forces, and not of &amp;quot;American foreign policy&amp;quot; or of the nation itself? (Garry Wills has been pounding this tin drum for decades now.) That title does not give him carte blanche to use the armed forces whenever he sees fit. The Founders &amp;quot;warranted&amp;quot; no such thing. As Mr. Madison took very great care to point out, In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found, than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture to heterogeneous powers, the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man; not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement.  If you follow the Constitution, the power to make war resides in the Congress. Period. That the Congress has allowed that power to drain away, and/or that the Congress has allowed its constitutional authority to atrophy, is beside the point. If it wishes to reassert those powers, it is perfectly within its constitutional mandate to do so. Yet that seems to be the very thing that some of the more serious critics of the president&amp;#039;s recent actions are arguing against. It is at the heart of every proxy argument being raised about the president&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;waffling&amp;quot; or the country&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;credibility.&amp;quot; If the president does not use military power unilaterally, it is argued, then the country is weaker in the world, our 10-1 advantage in every form of military hardware from nuclear warheads to socket wrenches notwithstanding. If the president does not use military power unilaterally, then Russia is stronger than we are. Iran is stronger than we are. Hezbollah is stronger than we are. That this is an argument even John Kerry has made on behalf of the administration shows how far down the constitutional rabbit hole we have descended.  If he wanted to do so, the president could use this moment to demonstrate how utterly empty the &amp;quot;constitutional conservative&amp;quot; portion of the Republican party really is, thereby defanging one of the most powerful sources of political energy the GOP has. (Do you see massive Tea Party demonstrations angrily insisting that the Congress assert its constitutional war powers? Yeah, me neither.) But he can&amp;#039;t do that, because he can&amp;#039;t do that and stay president in any meaningful sense. What he is doing is forcing the Congress to do what the Constitution unambiguously declares to be its job. If that inconveniences armchair generals on the cable teevee news, that&amp;#039;s just too bad. It is, finally, the very least we can do. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a24481/how-we-go-to-war/>