The War Powers Act allows the president to wage war for up to 60 days without approval from Congress. Time’s up in Libya. It might be partly that I deplore the very idea of a NATO-led war for humanitarian purposes, but I hope Congress is going to raise hell.
If this were a Republican president, we’d hear cries in the press about “the imperial presidency.” Oh, wait! This is exactly what did happen after George W. Bush’s lawyer John Yoo wrote a memo after 9/11 that claimed extensive presidential prerogative in the war on terror!
Timothy Carney of the Examiner notes:
Obama’s war is more clearly illegal. But nobody should expect this to matter to a president with a long record of disregarding legal and constitutional limits on presidential and federal power.
From the war in Libya to domestic politics (think “czars,” the awarding to Chrysler assets to his political friends instead of creditors, the attempt by his National Labor Relations Board to tell Boeing where it can do business, and a whole host of other actions), President Obama has exhibited a thirst for a disturbingly powerful presidency. What kind of president does this?
Carney notes:
We shouldn’t be surprised, considering the truth behind the observation from a character in Robert Frost’s poem “Build Soil”: “[W]hat are wars but politics transformed from chronic to acute and bloody?” Obama is waging war the same way he has waged politics….
Obamacare’s linchpin — a federal requirement that every person buy and hold health insurance — is a fine example of Obama’s disdain for the notion of enumerated powers. The administration’s lawyers have their constitutional defenses in court, but those arguments are more semantical than sincere. The telltale is the blatant contradiction between the politicians’ claims (it’s not a tax!) and the lawyers’ claims (it’s only a tax!).