How Comforting

National Journal has a story today titled "A President Who Ran Promising Peace Cautiously Declares War." The fact that the president is being "cautious" about all this is meant to inspire confidence and calm, yet under the Constitution the president does not have the power to declare war in the first place. It is Congress that owns the war power, as spelled out plainly in Articles I and II of the Constitution and in the emphatic words of the Federalist Papers, which were meant to sell the American people on that document. Here are the words from Federalist 69 of Alexander Hamilton -- a man who himself favored a strong executive branch -- describing how the president's war power is inferior to that of kings or even governors:

The President will have only the occasional command of such part of the militia of the nation as by legislative provision may be called into the actual service of the Union. The king of Great Britain and the governor of New York have at all times the entire command of all the militia within their several jurisdictions. In this article, therefore, the power of the President would be inferior to that of either the monarch or the governor. . . . It would amount to nothing more than the supreme command and direction of the military and naval forces, as first General and admiral of the Confederacy; while that of the British king extends to the declaring of war and to the raising and regulating of fleets and armies – all which, by the Constitution under consideration, would appertain to the legislature.

Sorry, America, you've been had. The president whose office was created by the Constitution is now unhindered by it and may unilaterally initiate war anywhere on the planet, putting you and countless others in immediate jeopardy. Some of you might be comfortable with this, but the sane among us are not. It's important to remember these things especially on this date, when many innocent Americans lost their lives in an act of retaliation (however despicable) against an imperial presidency that has bred anger and resentment around the world ever since the close of World War II, the last time Congress declared war. One does not have to be a "conspiracy theorist" to understand this. To fixate on whether 9/11 was a conspiracy is to miss the forest for the trees; right in plain view is the fact that empires breed terrorism, and that we now occupy an unconstitutional and lawless empire.

Many of Hamilton's contemporaries foresaw the monstrosity being created and opposed it, but they were too few. I would wager that if the Revolutionary generation could have foreseen what now exists -- either the imperial presidency or the general totalitarianism we have to put up with -- many or even most of them would have laid down their arms.