On June 21, US president Donald Trump ordered airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities. You may have heard. As I write this, we're in the "boasting about how splendid it all is" phase of Trump's cyclical foreign policy approach.
Phase One: Pretend to be "anti-war" and feverishly "negotiating" to avoid escalation of this or that long-term conflict.
Phase Two: Escalate.
Phase Three: Brag about what a genius he is.
Phase Four: Backtrack and maybe whine a little when it blows up in his face -- or, rather, in the faces of the troops he puts in harm's way.
It remains to be seen whether we'll get the usual Phase Four (a la the ignominious but long overdue US surrender in Afghanistan after his "surge," the Iranian strikes on US bases in Iraq after his operation to murder Iranian general Qasem Soleimani, etc.), or whether he'll really screw the pooch and set the Middle East on fire this time when the Iranians retaliate.
In the meantime, let's talk about the US Constitution.
This morning, I received an email from Defending Rights and Dissent, a pro-Constitution organization with a history stretching back to the era of McCarthyism. Subject line: "Trump shreds the Constitution. Bombs Iran. TAKE ACTION."
DRAD wants you to write "your" US Representative and US Senators, urging them to support a "War Powers Resolution" requiring Trump to stand down, on the clear and irrefutable constitutional claim that only Congress has the authority to declare war and that Trump's actions are therefore illegal.
Okay, yeah, I did that.
But realistically, Congress isn't any more likely to reassert its power over US war-making this time around than it did with Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, and numerous other belligerent actions/involvements.
We've been living in a "post-constitutional" era, featuring an "imperial" presidency, for at least 80 years, with Congress exercising about as much power as the Roman Senate under the Caesars.
How do we know that? The latest unimpeachable evidence for the claim is that Trump wasn't impeached on the evening of June 21 and convicted and removed from office on the morning of June 22. The prosecution rests, and the defense has no case.
As Lysander Spooner noted in 1870, "whether the Constitution really be one thing, or another, this much is certain -- that it has either authorized such a government as we have had, or has been powerless to prevent it. In either case it is unfit to exist."
Whether the Constitution was a good idea and whether it ever "worked" are interesting questions, but for all practical purposes, it ceased to exist as anything other than low-quality toilet paper decades ago, if not longer.
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