The Liberty Papers

In a post at Cato@Liberty discussing a question that Senator James Webb put to Secretary of State Rice yesterday, Gene Healy quotes portions of an interview with Vice-President Dick Cheney where he lays bare the Bush Administrations total disregard for the Separation of Powers:

Q: The Congressional vote. Do you recall discussing with the President what he would have done if he’d lost the votes.

Cheney: It was my view at the time [that] we were absolutely committed to getting Saddam Hussein out of Kuwait one way or the other, no matter what we had to do. We had to have the Saudis as allies in that venture, but if no-one else had been with us if it had just been the United States and Saudi Arabia, without the United Nations, without the authorisation of the Congress, we were prepared to go ahead. I argued in public session before the Congress that we did not need Congressional authorisation. That in fact we had the Truman precedent from the Korean crisis of 1950 that the Senate and all ratified the United Nations charter. By this time the UN Security Council had authorised the use of force back in November saying that we could do it by January 15th if he wasn’t out by then and that legally and from a constitutional stand point we had all the authority we needed.

I was not enthusiastic about going to Congress to ask for an additional grant of authority. I was concerned that they might well vote NO and that would make life more difficult for us, or that even if they voted YES and then we had a disaster on our hands and it didn’t work they’d still be against us. The President to his great credit felt very strongly that he wanted the Congress on board and he felt we could get them on board and he was correct. We went to work on them and had that vote and in fact prevailed. I think having had the Congress vote ultimately was a major plus.

Q: But if you’d lost the vote …?

Cheney: If we’d lost the vote in Congress, I would certainly have recommended to the President we go forward anyway. Again, as I say, you don’t go back having deployed forces over there and decided it was of strategically vital interest. The worst thing you could do in terms of the situation in that part of the world once you’ve got 500,000 troops out there in the desert is you can’t leave them there indefinitely, you cannot sustain that kind of deployment over time. Then you’re in real trouble if you decide you’re gonna bring them home…

Q: The President would have accepted that recommendation do you think?

Cheney: It’s my conviction, that he would in fact have gone forward whether Congress had supported the effort or not.

In order words, the heck with the Constitution. Forget the fact that it’s Congress, not the President that has the power to declare war. Forget the fact that it’s Congress that controls the purse to fund any military adventures. They would’ve done what ever they wanted to regardless of what everyone else thought.

As Healy points out, Cheney’s statement is not an aberation:

In April 2002, John Yoo, then with the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, testified before the Senate Judiciary Committee that ”the President has the constitutional authority to introduce the U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities when appropriate, with or without specific congressional authorization.” In an internal memorandum prepared shortly after September 11, 2001, Yoo had put it even more starkly: “In the exercise of his plenary power to use military force, the President’s decisions are for him alone and are unreviewable.”

The last time that Congress formally declared war was on December 8, 1941. From the sound of it, the Bush Administration apparently doesn’t think they’ll need to do that ever again.