Hmmm. I didn’t see either Bush or Kerry as “regular guys”.
They were both from families that could afford to send them to Yale, and neither man had to worry about paying rent. (Hence, somewhat more isolated from failure than the regular man.)
I’m not getting your point. When the poll was taken we hadn’t already “paid a month’s rent on the battlefield”. Anyway, it’s clear from the poll, when taken as a whole, that most Americans weren’t ready to jump on the war bandwagon in OCt of '02, contrary to the post that started this little discussion. And it wasn’t at all clear that it was politically expedient, even in the short term, for Congress to give Bush the broad authority that they did. The loud anti-war Democrats in the Senate that I remember got re-elected in Nov (Kennedy and Feingold come to mind) while some supporters of the AUMF got booted (like Daschle).
Anyway, without getting too sidetracked on this particular issue, my larger point is that expect Congress to be more responsiive to the will of the people since they set the larger, more long term policy goals. Congress is deliberative whereas the executive branch is designed to act quickly and sometimes it needs to go against public opinion-- eg, in the case of a real imminent threat (or grave and gathering threat, or whatever you want to call it).
You don’t want to run a war by committee or by popular opinion. But you don’t want to start one against popular opinion (which is where Congress comes in).
OK, you said:
IOW, Bush said war would be a last resort, but we all knew he was going to war pretty much regardless.
But if your poll fails to distinguish between people who thought war was inevitable because Bush was going to insist on it, and those who thought war was inevitable due to some other reason - most likely Saddam’s recalcitrance - then it doesn’t back up your point.
I agree with your initial point here - that Congress should set the policy goals.
So if we’re in a war and we change our minds about whether we want to keep on fighting, I’d argue that this isn’t about ‘running a war’, it’s about underlying policy, rather than strategy and tactics, so that falls under Congress’ responsibilities.
It’s up to Congress to tell the President that the public wants to start heading towards the exit, regardless of the situation on the ground. That’s setting policy, and if they were to do so, then the ‘surge’ would mean the President was deciding policy for himself, rather than using his wide latitude under Article II to determine how to carry out that policy.
But only 29% said that the war talk was about WMDs, so I think that’s the answer right there. If you look at the entire poll I think it says that we knew we were going to war regardless, for the most part. I certainly did. Didn’t you? The only question in my mind was whether or not Saddam was going to take the bait and flee the country. If he had, I’m not sure things would have turned out any differently.
I agree. As I said in another thread… I don’t like the idea of Congress telling the president when to increase troops or when it decrease them, but I’m perfectly fine with them shutting the whole thing down if they think that’s the best decision.
I don’t understand the difference between the president deciding policy for himself and using the wide lattitude of Article 2. Doesn’t Article 2 give him the authority to decide things “for himself” when it comes to the tactical decisions of warfare? What else would it mean to be Commander in Chief?
Tactical decisions, John. The President is charged to execute the will of the people, as represented by Congress. He can decide whether MacAurthur’s strategy for the Pacific Theater is correct, for instance. It is his decision as to how the will of Congress is to be implemented, it is not his decision to overrule Congress. The Commander in Chief follows orders. Our orders.
Would you suggest that if Congress declares war the President can refuse?
Did I say differently? Congress gave him the authority to wage the current war. Until and unless they take it away, he can wage it as he wills (within the bounds of other laws and within the financial constraints he has).
But I think he’s within his constitutional authority to ignore any resolution passed by Congress trying to prevent “the surge” from happening. He certainly wouldn’t have to get a permission slip from Congress to decrease the number of troops in Iraq. I don’t see a difference, wrt to his constitutional authority as the CiC.
At the time of the AUMF vote? No. My recollection is that during the summer, the Bushies would kinda saber-rattle against Iraq, then say they weren’t particularly serious about war…then fall came, and all of a sudden, without any new provocation by Iraq, there was this push for a war resolution.
Frankly, it was hard to know what to make of it; the suddenness and audacity caught me by surprise. I was still expecting foreign policy to make sense, even if their domestic policies didn’t.
I don’t remember that question even being discussed until early 2003.
Us agreeing??
I guess we can allow that. But only once in awhile. I appreciate having an honest opponent. 
Tactics aren’t policy. Policy is whether we’re going to be at war, and what our goals are. Tactics are how we try to realize those war aims.
So if we’ve made a decision to gradually withdraw, regardless of circumstances on the ground, that’s a policy decision. Decisions on how to manage the withdrawal would be the President’s prerogative. But to bring more troops into the country, either just because, or because the President felt that it would aid in some other goal (such as propping up the government), would be making policy, setting war aims, and contravening those set by Congress.
Propping up the government wouldn’t be America’s war aim anymore, just the President’s, so increasing troops to prop the government up would be tactics in pursuit of a personal war aim, rather than America’s. And to increase troops just because, when the goal is to get them out, ditto. One would have to assume that the President had some private reason or aim for those troops, and that’s not his business.
The AUMF vote was in the fall. Oct 14th, to be exact.
Yeah, you’re right. I’m misremembering the timeframe. That was after Powell’s UN speech.
Come on! We agree on lots of things. We agreed that this war was a mistake from the get-go. And I usually only respond to your posts when I disagree. 
Bush has varried the troop strength all along-- reducing it at times and increasing it at other times. But just to be clear, are you saying that Bush doesn’t have the authority today to add more troops in Iraq? Because I don’t think there’s a member of Congress who would agree with that, on either side of the aisle.
What you call “propping up” the Iraqi government is no different than what we’ve been doing since we handed over sovereignty to Iraq. Are you saying Bush was bound by the limits of the AUMF to exit as soon as that happened?
That was Dick Durbins case, I recall. It is something of a sophist’s argument, too cute by half, but it stands: the authorization covered specific points, the elimination of WMD and to affect regime change. Clearly, as Saddam has been hanged, regime change is accomplished (and the peasants rejoice…) Eliminating non-existent weapons is a bit more problematical, perhaps, but I think it safe to say that it is “accomplished”.
So any actions of the President in Iraq that are not directly relevent to the authorization are not authorized. The President was authorized to undertake action toward specific goals, once those goals are acheived, the AUMF does not continue, it is done, hence, moot. Just as a warrant to arrest Saddam is rendered moot by his suspended sentance.
Agreed, too cute by half, but then, on the other hand, drawing and inferring legitimacy for Presidential actions on a resolution gained under false premises is just as weak.
I don’t know about Durbin, but Kennedy is using that line of reasoning to introduce a bill to prevent “the surge”. But, as I said earlier in this thread or one of the other ones… the AUMF talked about al Qaeda. Now, they weren’t there before we invaded, but they are there now. In fact, Bush could plausibly* make the case that the Sept 14, 2001 AUMF gives him authority to operate in Iraq now due to al-Qaeda being there.
*plausibly, in at least the same sense that Kennedy’s reasoning is plausible.
Yeah, but in that instance it was in reference to the purported collussion between Saddam and ObL. Cellphones would melt in Hell, so its no longer possible.
I suspect we are all raising questions of legal mechanisms to a higher plane than they deserve. As has been noted, the number of troops as such is not all that dramatic, the symbolism of escalation is more important than the physical fact. All the Bushiviks have managed to do was to forestall the shitstorm from the Baker Report while GeeDubya pretended to ponder. Well, Cheney ponders, Bush just says “Narf!”
Any utilization of Congressional power to curtail the Executive is bound to involve disputes of this sort, somber and highly respected lawyers will have iron clad arguments diametricly opposed. Gonzales has his brief already written.
The more important intent of any such excercise is communication. And as the old joke goes, first you have to get his attention. And its making some people go on the record (Mr. Rodhams little girl Hillary, for instance, Brownbeck, etc…) and that is important.
It may be that nothing less than the spectre of impeachment will get through to his brain stem, a threat to his historical vanity may be the only hope.
Exactly. They didn’t roll out their new product until the beginning of fall, but once fall got here, all of a sudden, we needed an AUMF, like, yesterday.
I was just giving you a hard time.
Right NOW, Bush can do pretty much as he pleases in running the war. Congress would have to act in some fashion to change that. They haven’t.
No. I’m saying if Congress were to change the policy as described, then these things would be true. Strictly hypothetical.
OK. Feingold is trying to get Congress to defund the war, even with troops still over there. I don’t give him much of a chance of winning that one, but I admire his resolve.
BTW, I’d fully support a “sense of the Senate” or “sense of the House” resolution, even if it would be toothless. I’m sure there are quite a few Pubbies who would not look forward to voting on that one, and I expect it would be filibustered in the Senate.
At the time I didn’t know we were going to war, but I thought we would. I was convinced Saddam had WMDs, and was probably working on nuclear weapons (as opposed to the other WMDs). But I had some information the President seems not to have: the widely-spread CIA report that said Saddam was unlikely to use his WMDs against us unless he was attacked. Thus I reasoned that he was not a threat, and there were already mechanisms in place that would allow us to attack if the situation warranted it. My coworkers asked me (I kid you not) ‘Do you want to wait until Saddam drops a nuclear bomb on us before we defend ourselves?’ I tried to point out that Iraq did not have the ability to deliver a weapon against the United States, to no avail.
My point in my previous was that, at least as I remember it, the measure was sold as a ‘last resort’ thing regardless of what people believed would ultimately happen.
Now to read the rest of the thread…
Remember that the American people were against the Vietnam War two-to-one from 1968 onward. (Discussed here.) But we didn’t pull our last troops out until 1974.
Do you really think Bush is always cutting weeds down in Crawford because they really need clearing right away and he couldn’t hire anyone else to do the job? For that matter, do you think it’s a coincidence that Bush, a man who lived in cities his entire adult life, decided to buy a ranch the year before running for office?
Bush is so determined to seem like a regular guy that he is willing to allow himself to be caricatured as a fool rather than point to his Yale MBA as evidence to the contrary.
Ya know, if there ever was a time for someone to shout, “Whore!” I’d say this was it.
So, first we’d have mob rule, then grown-up mob rule? And this would be good? Nope, it’s still mob rule. And even if people would tend to become more well informed, that doesn’t mean they’d be well informed enough. Look, we accept the need to acquiese to professionals in other areas of life: unless you’re a lawyer yourself, if you have a need for legal advice, you go to a lawyer. Perhaps you check him out via friends and his legal record, maybe you go to multiple lawyers to get somewhat of a consensus as to how to address your particular issue. But in the end, you tend to take his advice. He’s a lawyer and you’re not. It’s fine to be well informed. But we don’t and shouldn’t vote for politicians to be puppets. There has to be some assumption that they have skills and knowledge we don’t. You can’t expect every voter to have the time and energy to evaluate every single issue down to its minutae as politicians do. There’s only so many hours in a day. So, instead, we hire politicians through elections.
Besides, your mob rule scenario lacks any real respect for the minority viewpoint. The founding fathers recognized this, and set us up as a republic for this very reason.
That’s just plain insulting. The majority, or “mob” elects the executive and legislative members. The only difference I see in expressing their stupidity between direct decisions and voting for Senators/Representatives/President is a delay in time.
I find the Privileged Rule, where Bush can send 21,000 people to possibly die in Irag against the will of the people far more odious.
You say, “the only thing…is a delay in time,” as if that’s trivial. No, it’s not trivial. And the checks and balances of both Houses (with the President’s veto threat and a possible Supreme Court challenge always looming in the background) provide a longer delay still…for a reason: the time delay will allow cooler and more reasoned heads to prevail. Yes, it’s inconvenient and slow. For a reason.
Sure, Bush is a complete moron. But he was elected twice by an electorate too dumb to see the folly of electing a complete failure of a man because they’d like to have a beer with him. Why would people that deluded and uninvolved become wiser and more involved in a direct democracy?