Tomgram: Danny Sjursen, Hail, (Donald) Caesar! | TomDispatch

War and the Imperial Presidency
Congress Offers a Bipartisan Blank Check to Donald Trump
By Danny Sjursen


It may be too late. The president of the United States is now a
veritable autocrat in the realm of foreign policy. He has been since at
least 1945, when the last congressionally declared war finally ended.
Wars in Korea, Vietnam, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, Kosovo, Afghanistan,
Iraq, Syria, and Yemen (among other places) were all waged via executive
fiat or feeble, open-ended congressional authorizations for the use of
military force, aka AUMFs. So it has been with increasing intensity for
73 years and so, most likely, it will remain.


Along with many others, this military officer has repeatedly decried
the no-longer-new normal of congressional acquiescence to presidential
power to no avail. When, in September 2017, Republican Senator Rand Paul
sought to repeal (and replace within six months)
the existing 2001 AUMF, which had authorized the president to use force
against the perpetrators and enablers of the 9/11 attacks, he could
barely muster
35 votes. Given that any president, Republican or Democrat, would veto
such a curtailment of the essentially unlimited executive prerogative to
make war, that’s still some 32 votes short of a Senate override. In
hopelessly divided Washington, that’s the definition of impossibility.


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