"
The most controversial constitutional issue involves presidential warmaking without a declaration from Congress, when presidents depend solely on their constitutional prerogative as commander in chief. Outside the United States, presidents have used the armed forces without congressional declarations of war in more than 230 instances, relying on that constitutional prerogative. Fewer than half of these instances involved prior legislative authorization. Almost all use of force by presidents in the nineteenth century without a declaration of war involved minor incidents—mostly against pirates and bandits. Uses of force in hostilities without congressional sanction in the twentieth century, however, have involved much wider operations against organized governments. With large numbers of American soldiers killed or wounded in pursuit of foreign policy goals, such actions raised serious questions of constitutionality.
Uses of force based on the commander in chief's power include gaining additional territory for the United States, such as
Florida (actions of
James Monroe and John Quincy Adams), the American Southwest (during the
Mexican War), and
Hawaii. Presidents may order actions against politically unorganized pirates and bandits, drug smugglers, and terrorists that may involve limited incursion into another state or its airspace or territorial waters. Presidents may order the evacuation of U.S. citizens and interventions to protect American lives and property during disorders in foreign nations. In some situations, the United States may be involved unilaterally or multilaterally in efforts to restore law and order in other nations. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the U.S. Army fought frontier wars against Indian tribes. In the early twentieth century, presidents ordered U.S. forces to intervene in Caribbean nations to administer their assets on behalf of their creditors; these included
Haiti,
Nicaragua, the
Dominican Republic, and
Cuba. Presidents have used force to topple regimes unfriendly to the United States, such as the Dominican Republic (1965),
Grenada (1982),
Panama (1989), and Haiti (1994).
Presidents have enforced
blockades and quarantines, for example, the quarantine of Cuba during the
Cuban Missile Crisis (1962–63); the blockade of
Iraq in 1990 to attempt to pressure that nation to withdraw from
Kuwait; the subsequent blockade designed to ensure acquiescence in
United Nations resolutions; and the blockade of Haiti in 1993 in an effort to force a change in government. Since the early 1950s, presidents have had the capacity to launch preemptive or retaliatory nuclear strikes in the event of all‐out nuclear war, or to order a nuclear “first use” against an enemy in the process of defeating U.S. conventional forces. The exigencies of the use of nuclear weapons make it highly unlikely that Congress could be part of such a decision. More recently, presidents have used U.S. forces for United Nations' or other multilateral
peacekeeping, humanitarian, or monitoring operations, such as the protection of foreign aid workers in
Somalia in 1992–93, the relief of famine in
Rwanda in 1994, and the
NATO peacekeeping mission in
Bosnia beginning in 1995.
The most controversial use of presidential power has involved deployment of U.S. forces in major hostilities without a declaration of war. Three major instances come to mind: North Korea (1950–53), North Vietnam (1964–73), and Iraq (1991). In the Korean and Iraq hostilities, Presidents Truman and Bush cited UN authorization. However, Truman used force prior to obtaining UN authorization, and neither president followed the procedures set down by Congress in the UN Participation Act (1945), which required congressional approval for commitments of force in UN operations. In the
Vietnam War, President Johnson claimed he was executing provisions of
SEATO, yet the relevant provisions required consultation with other signatory nations and did not specify the use of military force to deal with a civil war between two “military regroupment zones” (i.e., North and South Vietnam). In all three cases, presidents acted according to their prerogative power, and in
Korea and
Vietnam, no hostilities were authorized by Congress (though the
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution did authorize
Johnson to use necessary measures to protect U.S. forces). Indeed,
the War Powers Resolution of 1973 sought to impose Congressional approval for committing U.S. troops to combat. In 1991, Bush lobbied Congress for authorization to use force to implement UN resolutions; but in his signing statement once a resolution had been passed, the president refused to concede that he had needed such authorization, claiming instead that he had “constitutional authority to use the Armed Forces to defend vital U.S. interests.” Congress passed a second resolution reiterating its understanding that the president had been required to obtain prior authorization from Congress before using force against Iraq, leaving the two institutions at loggerheads about the authority of the president to engage in military actions to implement UN resolutions."
The constitution never stopped them before.
March 13th, 2008
Attack Iran 
Congress can't do shit. He can invade just with executive powers.
Similar Threads 
