AMY GOODMAN: And who has sued? Can you talk about this bipartisan group, Congressmember Kucinich?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, yes. I mean, this is a nonpartisan issue that relates to the imperative of our Constitution to be able to withstand the buffeting that happens from both directions, left and right. This coalition, made up of members--Walter Jones, who is a Republican from North Carolina, who started off in favor of the war in Iraq and has become a very strong supporter not only of withdrawing our troops from these areas, but also a strong supporter of the constitutional imperative to have Congress involved in this decision making; Ron Paul is very involved in this; Dan Burton; John Conyers, who's the former chair of the Judiciary Committee and a Democrat from Michigan. We have a coalition that includes Mike Capuano from--a Democrat from Massachusetts. It's a coalition that's as broad as this country, and it's a coalition that is quite diverse politically.
And I think that needs to be said, because it points to the fact that there's growing opposition in this country not simply to the war in Libya, but there's growing opposition to the United States inserting itself, alone or with NATO, as kind of a global cop, while our priorities here at home are getting ignored. And that's something that needs to be said right now. With 14 million Americans out of work, with 50 million Americans still without decent healthcare, with so many Americans losing their jobs and their retirement security, with people not being able to send their children to the schools they envisioned they'd be able to send them to, with our environment deteriorating, we are still prosecuting wars and trying to play global cop.
I mean, there's other issues here, but I'm--in the court, though, we're focusing very sharply on this issue of what Article I, Section 8, really means. And I'm hopeful that if we get standing, we'll be able to create a classic resetting of the pointer, as far as rebalancing the power relationships in this country that have gone askew since executives have been appropriating the war power.
AMY GOODMAN: Robert Turner, your response to this lawsuit of Congressmember Kucinich and other members of Congress, Democrat and Republican, saying that President Obama is violating the War Powers Act?
ROBERT TURNER: President Obama's position is absolutely clear: we are not engaged in war in Libya, and thus, if the War Powers Resolution were constitutional, it still would not apply. On August 17th, 1787, James Madison introduced an amendment in the Constitutional Convention that changed the power to be given in Congress from the power to make war to the power to declare war. That was a term from the Law of Nations. It was understood by all of the publicists who wrote about, by Grotius, Vattel, men whose writings were cited by the Founding Fathers that you only declare war when you were launching an all-out, what today we would call an aggressive war. That kind of war has been outlawed. No country has declared war since the U.N. Charter went into force in 1945. That clause is as much an anachronism today as the power given to Congress, in the same sentence, to grant letters of marque and reprisal, which were outlawed in 1856 in the Pact of Paris.
I've been writing about this since the War Powers Resolution went into force. I worked in the Senate for the first five years. I served as acting assistant secretary of state for legislative affairs during the Reagan administration. And just in 19---sorry, in 2008, we had a national bipartisan War Powers Commission, that included Lee Hamilton, Slade Gorton and a number of other congressional liberals, former congressional liberals. They unanimously said the War Powers Resolution is unconstitutional. George Mitchell, former majority leader, on May 19th, 1988, said on the Senate floor that the War Powers Resolution brings Congress into force short of war, expanding its power into the power of the president. It is true the War Powers Resolution tries to control this, but as Chief Justice John Marshall told us in perhaps the most famous Supreme Court case of all, Marbury v. Madison, "an act of the legislature, repugnant to the Constitution, is void." If it's void, it's not law. If it's not law, the president has no duty to see it faithfully executed.
AMY GOODMAN: Congressmember Kucinich?
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, I would like to ask Mr. Turner if he's read the filing.
AMY GOODMAN: Have you read the filing?
ROBERT TURNER: I glanced through the filing. This is political theater. The congressman certainly knows, because he was involved in the Campbell lawsuit during the Kosovo operation, and he knows from history that back during Vietnam the courts always dismiss these suits for lack of standing. The Article III of the Constitution--
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: Well, I--you know, I beg--
ROBERT TURNER:--requires a case or controversy.
REP. DENNIS KUCINICH: I beg the gentleman's pardon. I take an oath to defend the Constitution. This isn't theater. I was the second person on that complaint that Congressman Campbell filed in 1999. I see this as a serious question of whether or not the Founders intended the power to declare war to reside in the legislative branch. Did they really mean it when they wrote that in Article I, Section 8, Clause 11? Or did they mean, when they went to the--to Article II of the Constitution and called the president the commander-in-chief, that he could could summon forth the troops without the ability--or without having to go to Congress? Our lawsuit is attempting to establish that, once and for all, that Congress does have the sole power to declare war.
The War Powers Act, you know, we may--there may--I'm not going to say there's no debate about the War Powers Act. We include that in our filing. And the gentleman who has written extensively about it is aware of the defects of the War Powers Act. We're trying to get some clarification from a court on that. But I will say, if we are able to get standing on this, if the court will go beyond what the Supreme Court did in 1999 in saying that, you know, this was just a political question and dismissing it, and saying Congress ultimately has the power of the purse--if we get beyond that and go to the real deep meaning of Article I, Section 8, we may see a whole new day here, where no executive will in the future will be able to go and declare war without checking with Congress. The Founders were very clear about not wanting the power of war to be put in the hands of an executive solely. And so, they balanced it by making sure that Article I, Section 8, defined that Congress has this power.
Now, one more thing. The gentleman said it's not a war. Now, I ask you, if another country sent 2,000 planes over our--missions over the United States, and some of those missions dropped bombs on us, would that be an act of war against the United States? Because that's exactly what we've done in Libya.
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