We've seen this before, and I am expecting a complete ideological turn-around by the Republican party if Obama wins. - Derbig Mooser

[Perhaps especially as a result of the apparently-huge recent discovery/confirmation of oil under Montana that is threatening to make news.]

Congressional prerogatives have been purposely subsumed and voluntarily relinquished - capped most openly by "off the table" - to a dictatorial presidency in our "Republic."

The more potent an offensive and defensive military capability a nation has at hand, in readiness, the greater the inevitable temptation to deploy it - a human trait very well understood by Founders like Madison who witnessed the strutting vanity of idle monarchs eager to prove their "greatness" by deploying their standing armies in foreign adventures. Accordingly, in this nuclear age, all the more vital is the need to ensure - as the Founders intended - that the decision about deploying that potent offense and defense (absent emergency) remain in the hands of the people through their elected representatives in Congress.

Instead, however, the opposite has occurred - our Congress has never regained its footing since the close of World War II, with respect to its war powers. It has instead increasingly deferred, dangerously and slavishly, to the presidency, which today very much resembles a monarchy, with a figurehead from the "royal family" presiding and a cutthroat counselor (Cheney) manipulating that monarch to bend him to his will (behind the scenes and always in secret) to threaten and fight allegedly-menacing "others" using lives and resources provided for the common defense. Congress acts now as but a figleaf of a council of ministers to our monarch, following the sort of ancient pattern that led to the horror and insanity that was the First World War and its vicious after effects.

Thus, in 2002, Congress abdicated its Constitutional duty to decide whether or not to fight Iraq by ceding war powers, that it has no authority to cede, to the presidency via the AUMF resolution. And it stood mute in response to this signing statement assertion (rightly noted by 'The Fly-Man') from that president it had decided to endow with the power to make its decisions:

"...the long-standing positions of the executive branch on either the President's constitutional authority to use force to deter, prevent, or respond to aggression or other threats to U.S. interests or on the constitutionality of the War Powers Resolution.

That's Empire speaking, unopposed. As Sandy Levinson put it well about Senator Clinton's statement regarding Iran:

In any event, one should take special note of Hillary Clinton's remarkable statement to ABC News, "I want the Iranians to know that if I'm the president, we will attack Iran. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them." This is the statement of someone running for constitutional dictatorship, not for a "republican form of government" presidency who might have said, for example, "as President, I will certainly urge the Congress to declare war on Iran should Iran attack Israel"--..snip..--"though I recognize that that decision is ultimately for Congress to make."

http://balkin.blogspot.com/2008/04/as-we-prepare-to-elect-our-next.html

Once the dogs of war are unleashed, they are unleashed. The military's job is to destroy people and property in the name of survival (for a Republic) and/or conquest (for an Empire). If we cannot solve our problems or access necessary resources without laying waste to the earth and everything on it by unleashing force - with its inherent inertia that takes determined effort to stop once started - we have no right to pretend to "civilization." There has not been any concerted effort made to control the American war machine that was necessarily unleashed against the unchecked, Hitler-worshipping, racist Nazis and Empire of Japan, and then Stalin's Soviet Union. The unquestioned default "answer" which this nation and human nature - helped mightily by Hollywood mythmaking, ignorance of history and greed - has arrived at seems to be simply to create an Empire and Emperor of our own.

The choice for Americans today - nowhere more urgently than for those elected to represent us in Congress - is between Empire and Republic. We cannot have both. We are violently playing at Empire now, while pretending to still be the Republic our Constitution designed. But the actions and the words of our Members of Congress, our president (and of all three candidates to succeed him) and our press are of, by and for Empire, and many Americans now think in terms of Empire, not in terms of self-government, democratic will and only necessary, Congressionally-authorized self-defense, as opposed to (inevitably, temporary) global domination.

Thus, as Juan Cole points out, we have members of the private-interest press making statements like this about our stated, purported effort to "reconcile" Iraqis with each other, supposedly to save them from themselves with disinterested benevelonce, using taxpayer debt and the lives of our volunteer military; the allegedly-noble, self-sacrificing effort that Nancy Pelosi (who seems to love the role of Empress to Bush's Emperor) and Steny Hoyer, to muted opposition, are now doing their damnedest to continue, at our expense, obviously knowing - along with most Americans by now - that the cover story is a lie:

"That's true too. And that backwater [Pakistan/Afghanistan] of geo-strategical importance, really, is more important than Iraq? This country right in the middle of the Middle East, a strategically important country with all this oil? If we lose [Iraq], we lose everything. Afghanistan won't even matter then at all." - Fred Barnes on FOX, 4/23/08

http://www.newshounds.us/2008/04/27/blood_for_oil_fred_barnes_says_so.php

Racism, unchecked presidential power, and nuclear weapons: A potent combination, a deadly 'playing with fire,' that Members of Congress and the press are ignoring or fueling, thereby helping to expose us all to the risks of lethal explosion and fall-out, all in the warmonger-beloved name of "our own protection."