Posts Tagged ‘U.S. Constitution’

(Saving) Money Is No Object: Tea Party Budget Thinking

One has to ask what kind of country the Tea Partiers desire, though. Clearly it is a big step away from a commonwealth. In Tea Party Utopia, it seems, the Partiers would get maximize their personal wealth, at whatever cost to the well-being of their fellow-citizens, even, or perhaps especially the poorest. It’s a country where there would be no planning or direction of economic activity from Washington, apparently in the faith that an atomized economy could avoid obliteration by the better-organized economies of other nations. And a faith as well, in the teeth of historical evidence, that privately-funded economic forces undirected by government, would give us an adequate infrastructure. And in Tea Party Utopia, cultural elites would be denied the support and recognition that even the tiny sliver of the national budget dedicated to edifying them conveys.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 2: Imperfect War

Thus the Supreme Court’s solution to the problem here was to rely on Congressional authorization of war as a sufficient substitute for Congressional declaration of war. The Court never directly addressed the ship-owner’s point that the Constitution speaks only of declarations of war, not of authorizations. The Framers would have been spinning in their graves.

War Powers, War Lies: Part 1: Original Intent

In short, the power to give or withhold a declaration of war was generally viewed by the Founders as tantamount to the power to decide whether hostilities would take place, with the well-recognized exception of defense against direct attack. This placed the real war-making power in the hands of the Congress, not the President.

Debatable Laws

Laws lots of people support and lots of people disagree with. How you do or do not comply helps determine how legitimate these laws are.