That fear proved to be well founded, as history would soon confirm, when President Truman sent US troops to Korea as part of a UN mission -- but without a Congressional declaration.
President Obama's approval of an intervention in Libya has also skipped the Congress.
Was this necessary? Of course not. Obama could have consulted Congress; indeed, if the issue was pressing, he could have asked that the House and Senate be called into session over the weekend.
That is what Congressman Dennis Kucinich proposed, when he declared last week that "Congress should be called back into session immediately to decide whether or not to authorize the United States' participation in a military strike. If it does not, the action of the President is contrary to [the] US Constitution. Article 1, Section 8 of the Constitution clearly states that the United States Congress has the power to declare war. The President does not. That was the Founders' intent."
The Ohio Democrat sent a letter to Congressional leaders "indicating that the national interest requires that Congress be called back quickly to Washington to exercise its Constitutional authority to determine whether our armed forces should participate in the UN mission."
"Both houses of Congress must weigh in," Kucinich added. "This is not for the President alone, or for a few high ranking Members of Congress to decide."
Consulting Congress does not mean that Congress will block a war. The constitutional system of checks and balances was not established merely to stop wars, although the wisest of the founders did hope that the requirements they imposed would "chain the dogs of war."
The decision to place the power to declare wars was placed with the House and Senate in order to allow members of Congress to add their insights, to propose time lines, to set limits and parameters for military initiatives.
The debate, the discussion, the sifting and winnowing of information: This is the point.
Unfortunately, it is a point that Obama has missed.
The United States is now deep into what CNN calls the "Libya War," yet there has been no Congressional debate, no advice or consent, no checks and balances.
The Republic was well served by the drafters of a constitution, who gave the war-making power to Congress.
They were wise, and right, to do so. And any president who steers the country into an offensive war without consulting Congress ill serves the founding document and the republic.
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