If we can’t make the world safe for democracy, at least we can make it safe for the iPhone….

They shall in all cases, except treason, felony and breach of the peace, be privileged from arrest during their attendance at the session of their respective Houses, and in going to and returning from the same; and for any speech or debate in either House, they shall not be questioned in any other place. [Article 1, Section 6, paragraph 1]

Note, treason negates the immunity granted members of Congress. Not since the Civil War has this been an issue. Until now, that is. What Reid is doing is perilously close to committing treason. He is advocating and working towards the defeat of the United States during a time of war.

Of course, some think I’m mistaken. But I’ve performed considerable research on the subject and here is what I’ve found:

The Founders explicitly limited the declaration of war to the Congress. Neither the President nor the Judiciary can declare war. Further, the US Supreme Court has ruled that an authorization to use force passed by both Houses and signed into law as a public act is the same thing as a formal declaration of War.

However, the Founders gave the President the exclusive and plenary power to wage war, not Congress. Included in the “war powers” is the exclusive Presidential determination of what strategy to use, when to use it, and the sole power to determine when hostilities have ended. Congress, according to the Constitution and case law has no say in HOW the war is waged.

That bears repeating: CONGRESS is not empowered by either the Constitution or by US Supreme Court decision to make decisions or policy on how to wage war. That is the exclusive power of the President.

Some, including some in government say that Congress is left with, or is reduced to, the power of the purse. That is to say, Congress can defund the war and, thus, prevent the waging of war. Except, that this has never been done by ANY Congress, not even during the Vietnam War. Then, Congress cut off funding after all combat and training troops had been removed from the country, not while our troops were still fighting.

Arguably, given the precedents, there is a view that once Congress has declared war (or authorized military force), that they cannot “go back on their word” and defund it because it would interfere with the President’s ability to fight a war they authorized. Declaring war, the Founders felt, was of such a serious nature — one that would consume the blood and treasure of the (then) newly formed nation — that they wanted Congress to be absolutly sure of the necessity AND, as representatives of the People and the States, to be the sole power to commit the nation to fighting. But the Founders did not mention ONE WORD about Congress being able to end wars. Not by “the power of the purse.” Not by public law. Not by statutory curtailment of the President’s war powers, either. The Founders clearly limited Congress’s role to that of determining when to go to war and only that.

The plain fact is that Congress cannot modify the Constitution by resolution. It has to be formally amended. Passing funding cutoffs, after war has been declared (or the military use of force authorized) is not one of the powers Congress has because it is ursurping the ability of the President to wage war, a power that is his and only his.

Therefore, what Reid (and Levin) are doing is not only unconstitutional, but the act of doing so effectively sabotages the ability of the country to wage the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, and that borders on treason. This is, I admit, a fine and close reading of the Constitution, but the logic is clear.

As near as I can tell, ONCE WAR HAS BEEN DECLARED, Congress no longer has the power to defund that war as it ursurps the powers of the plenary power of the President to wage it. Once war has been declared, Congress’s role, as defined by the Constitution, is to (1) raise money to pay for it, (2) raise armies and provide training, (3) outfit the militia and train when necessary, (4) issues letter of Marque and Reprisal, (5) appoint courts to determine the disposition of prizes, and so on. If Congress refuses to appropriate funds to fight the war, then they would betraying the troops fighting it and would be making decisions (de facto) concerning the waging of it (i.e., forcing the President to STOP waging war). Causing the country to lose a war in progress is, clearly, treason.

Bush and Gonzales don’t have the stones to do it, but they could indict Pelosi for violating the Logan Act for her visits to Syria, and Reid (and others, including Pelosi and Murtha) for treason.

Congress does have one method of dealing with a war they do not like (or do not like how it is being waged) — they can FIRE the President if they are unhappy about the way the war has been waged. The process is called impeachment and removal by the Senate. To the best of my knowledge, this is the ONLY way Congress can disapprove of the way a war is run after approving the waging of it.

The Founders crafted the Constitution to insure the survival of the nation, and thence liberty. The last thing they wanted is runing a war by committee as happened during the Revolution. So they deliberately REMOVED the war powers from Congress and gave them to the President. And they made sure that there was no language in the Constitution to allow Congress to change its mind once war was delcared.

Congressional Republicans, including most of those calling for a new Iraq strategy, were expected to oppose Levin’s proposal to set a timetable for troop withdrawals. But various members were expected to propose alternative measures, including legislation calling on Bush to adopt as U.S. policy recommendations by the Iraq Study Group, which identified a potential redeployment date of spring 2008.

So far, six GOP senators – Lamar Alexander of Tennessee, Judd Gregg of New Hampshire, Robert Bennett of Utah, Susan Collins of Maine, John Sununu of New Hampshire and Pete Domenici of New Mexico – support such legislation.

Other prominent Republican senators, including Richard Lugar of Indiana, George Voinovich of Ohio, Chuck Hagel of Nebraska and Olympia Snowe of Maine, also say the U.S. should begin redeployments.

I know that Snowe is major RINO material, but it still shocked me to find a Republican, other than Chuck Hagel, saying (per the Providence Journal), “Obviously, the surge has not worked.” Even John Edwards wouldn’t hazard such a statement three weeks into a major operation, if he were still a Senator from North Carolina.

Does anyone here know where I can find out how many guys from Maine are serving in Iraq?

I still can’t believe that I’d acidentally double post the one comment I was too tired to edit for either clarity or length. It’s probably just as well that we appear to be the only ones here! The point that I managed to obsure was originally pretty straightforward: As long as we’re picking at somebody else’s argument/narrative instead of promoting our own, we’re loosing. The New York Times laid out the competition’s best case, and if we can’t come up with a better story, the jig is up.

I remember thinking, and I’m sure many other have done the same, why didn’t they stop Hitler while there was still time? How could they fail to see what was coming? We are watching the answers to those questions being played out right now. Maybe when a nuclear Iran has control all the way through Syria into Lebanon, people will wake up. At the eleventh hour, of course. 11:59, to be precise.

And that’s the acid test for the conservative blogosphere, as it is for any minority, because we’ll almost never have the numbers. Sure, we can rally public opinion, but can we actually influence it? We spend most of our time preaching to the converted instead of figuring out how to challenge conventional wisdom where it counts. There’s plenty of intelletual firepower on this side of the argument; if we’re not equpped to negotiate the rock & the hard place we now confront, it’s the template, stupid!

Liberals didn’t start out with the numbers either, but what they do have is a compelling narrative which is almost impervious to the kind of fact checking endeavors we’re all so good at. Debunking is easy, and when we were in the majority on the war it may have seemed suffiicient, but we’re still fisking away instead of developing a competitive narrative of our own. If the pullout Democrats are looking for occurs, it won’t just be an Adminstration failure, it will be ours too.

Make no mistake about it, there is a White House failure here, and no help on the way from that quarter. They never understood the role of story telling in politics on the first place. Folks may take offense, but they were selling immigration the same way they’ve sold pretty much everything else, including Iraq. Plan B is even simpler than Plan A: You pull up the drawbridge and try to present the smallest, hardest target you can manage. You replace Rumsfeld with the lowest profile guy you can persude to take the job, and then create a war czar to confuse the field.

Before the ‘06 election, we could get away with ignoring a defection by someone like Richard Lugar. Unfortunately, with the President in full Turtle Mode, there’s only one storyline in town. It’s Baker/Hamilton, the liberals own it, and we have a decision to make. We can keep on talking amongst ourselves, or we can work on figuring out how to engage the opposition where it counts. The snark, and the ridicule, and the outrage we share are no substitute for a coherent argument, and they don’t make an unpopular argument any easier to sell.

It’s true that we can’t just channel public opinion into Congress this time around, but if being in the minority is an unsurmountable obstacle, why are we even here? The war effort is at risk because of Republican defections, and that’s something we should be able to do something about. Democrats have successfully made this George Bush’s war, and that’s a double whammy we’ve got a lame duck President whose popularity has also tanked. Maybe it’s actually a stroke of luck that the Prez seems to have given up campaigning for the war, because Republicans need something to defend that is not Bush’s war. What they desperately lack are cheat sheets on the Democrats “facts” and a comprehensive not-Bush set of talking points that knock your socks off.

And guess what! The New York Times just handed us that storyline on a silver platter. They’ve done the one thing that almost no Democrat but Murtha has been dumb enough to do till now: they gave us an actual plan in all its misguided glory to build upon. We’re not talking WMD any more. At long last, the Times has fully admitted to the consequences of withdrawing now, and the genocide they’re virtually predicting takes the modest concept of acceptable collateral damage to dizzying new heights. They’ve collected every misbegotten assumption we’ve been debunking piecemeal for years. We can fisk it point by illogical point, or we can use it as new template. They’re not just showing us what we’re fighting; they’re also showing us how. Will we rise to the challenge? The chips are down, and we’re about to find out who is really in the game and who is realistically just carping from the sidelines.

And that’s the acid test for the conservative blogosphere, as it is for any minority, because we’ll almost never have the numbers. Sure, we can rally public opinion, but can we actually influence it? We spend most of our time preaching to the converted instead of figuring out how to challenge conventional wisdom where it counts. There’s plenty of intelletual firepower on this side of the argument; if we’re not equpped to negotiate the rock & the hard place we now confront, it’s the template, stupid!

Liberals didn’t start out with the numbers either, but what they do have is a compelling narrative which is almost impervious to the kind of fact checking endeavors we’re all so good at. Debunking is easy, and when we were in the majority on the war it may have seemed suffiicient, but we’re still fisking away instead of developing a competitive narrative of our own. If the pullout Democrats are looking for occurs, it won’t just be an Adminstration failure, it will be ours too.

Make no mistake about it, there is a White House failure here, and no help on the way from that quarter. They never understood the role of story telling in politics on the first place. Folks may take offense, but they were selling immigration the same way they’ve sold pretty much everything else, including Iraq. Plan B is even simpler than Plan A: You pull up the drawbridge and try to present the smallest, hardest target you can manage. You replace Rumsfeld with the lowest profile guy you can persude to take the job, and then create a war czar to confuse the field.

Before the ‘06 election, we could get away with ignoring a defection by someone like Richard Lugar. Unfortunately, with the President in full Turtle Mode, there’s only one storyline in town. It’s Baker/Hamilton, the liberals own it, and we have a decision to make. We can keep on talking amongst ourselves, or we can work on figuring out how to engage the opposition where it counts. The snark, and the ridicule, and the outrage we share are no substitute for a coherent argument, and they don’t make an unpopular argument any easier to sell.

It’s true that we can’t just channel public opinion into Congress this time around, but if being in the minority is an unsurmountable obstacle, why are we even here? The war effort is at risk because of Republican defections, and that’s something we should be able to do something about. Democrats have successfully made this George Bush’s war, and that’s a double whammy we’ve got a lame duck President whose popularity has also tanked. Maybe it’s actually a stroke of luck that the Prez seems to have given up campaigning for the war, because Republicans need something to defend that is not Bush’s war. What they desperately lack are cheat sheets on the Democrats “facts” and a comprehensive not-Bush set of talking points that knock your socks off.

And guess what! The New York Times just handed us that storyline on a silver platter. They’ve done the one thing that almost no Democrat but Murtha has been dumb enough to do till now: they gave us an actual plan in all its misguided glory to build upon. We’re not talking WMD any more. At long last, the Times has fully admitted to the consequences of withdrawing now, and the genocide they’re virtually predicting takes the modest concept of acceptable collateral damage to dizzying new heights. They’ve collected every misbegotten assumption we’ve been debunking piecemeal for years. We can fisk it point by illogical point, or we can use it as new template. They’re not just showing us what we’re fighting; they’re also showing us how. Will we rise to the challenge? The chips are down, and we’re about to find out who is really in the game and who is realistically just carping from the sidelines.

We’re gonna leave troops to fight Al Q and terrorism…

And train Iraqis….

and support….

Uh… isn’t that what we are doing now?

On-my-soap-box on July 9, 2007 at 6:30 PM

It succeeded. That’s the only time I’ve seen a smile on that clown’s face since they took over the house. Scary when a corpse smiles. Also, people like this can get elected, but St. Cindy shouldn’t be taken too seriously? hmmm

Who are “they” that dropped the bomb? Is he blaming us and couldn’t say it or them and admitting we have a job to do.

Then, he smiled about the town being disintegrated!

In a way both. He thinks that Iraqis dropped the bomb but that every action and reaction in this conflict is traceable to the US. In other words he is denying the Iraqis human agency. This attitude is more contemptible than that of the colonial class that ran British India. It’s a product of liberal narcissism and self-loathing.

*WHAM WHAM WHAM*

I just strangled my monitor…