Obama disses the Constitution again

Spencer Ackerman, Guardian - In the space of a single prime time address on Wednesday night, Barack Obama dealt a crippling blow to a creaking, 40-year old effort to restore legislative primacy to American war making - a far easier adversary to vanquish than the Islamic State. Obama’s legal arguments for unilaterally expanding a war expected to last years have shocked even his supporters.

Ahead of Wednesday’s speech the White House signaled that Obama already “has the authority he needs to take action” against Isis without congressional approval. Obama said he would welcome congressional support but framed it as optional, save for the authorizations and the $500m he wants to use the US military to train Syrian rebels. Bipartisan congressional leaders who met with Obama at the White House on Tuesday expressed no outrage.

The administration’s rationale, at odds with the war it is steadily expanding, is to forestall an endless conflict foisted upon it by a bloodthirsty legislature. Yet one of the main authorities Obama is relying on for avoiding Congress is the 2001 wellspring of the war on terrorism he advocated repealing only last year, a document known as the Authorization to Use Military Force that few think actually applies to Isis.

Taken together with the congressional leadership’s shrug, Obama has stripped the veneer off a contemporary fact of American national security: presidents make war on their own, and congresses acquiesce.

The constitution envisions the exact opposite circumstance. A 1973 reform, the War Powers Resolution, attempted a constitutional restoration in the wake of the Vietnam war, ensuring that the legal authorization for conflict deployments were voided after 60 days. Yet its restrictions on military action have proven far less durable in conflicts like Grenada, Kosovo, Libya and now the 2014-vintage Iraq war.

For the Obama administration, an allergy to congressional authorization is enmeshed with the president’s stated desire to end what he last year termed a “perpetual war” footing. It has led Obama in directions legal scholars consider highly questionable.