The pseudonym "Philo Vaihinger" has been abandoned. All posts have been and are written by me, Joseph Auclair.

Tuesday, March 12, 2013

Drones and the Authorization for the Use of Force



Military decisions are not made in public.

The methods by which military decisions are made are not discussed in public.

Making such decisions is the constitutional prerogative of the commander in chief, and the congress has no role.

Though treaties can certainly limit the president’s choice of weapons it is not entirely clear the congress can.

Terminating the authorization on which the current state of war with the Taliban and al-Qaeda and all their allies and enablers rests will discontinue the president’s ability to engage in actions legally presupposing that.

This assumes, of course, that having once declared war congress can thereafter call it off.

Where does it say that, actually, in the text?

In the part written in invisible ink.

Anyway and apart from that, since when has anyone seriously held that the president is not free to use the military as he judges best, overseas, in engagements short of war?

Is this or is this not part of the inherent authority of the commander in chief?

Or perhaps an inherent part of the executive power the constitution lodges in the president?

More of that invisible ink so much of the constitution is so famously written in.

And lobbing around a few drones is pretty far short of war, if you asked me, no matter how many of the president’s opponents yell about it being “an act of war.”

Too, there is no good reason to claim that these powers of the president do not include the power to kill Americans as well as others, as needed.

The lives of Americans dangerous to us all are not more precious than those of others posing a like threat.

And there is nothing in the text of the constitution to force such a distinction upon us or upon the president.

The NYT, by the way, is rarely as liberal as one would wish on class war or other economic matters.

Too bad they have decided to join the professional left on this one, clearly upholding the false claim that repeal would end the president's power to do anything they don't like in the region and especially end his power to use drones.

(This is the same editorial board that still has not accepted Heller, that the 2nd Amendment creates an individual right, and that the 2nd Amendment does not confer on the states the right they already had to maintain militia of their own or a right to keep up their units of today's National Guard.)


As for war, what would make any adult believe that “as Jeh [sic] Johnson, then counsel to the defense secretary, said in a speech last November, ‘War must be regarded as a finite, extraordinary and unnatural state of affairs’”?

What, on this planet?

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