{"id":25397,"date":"2011-04-01T01:45:45","date_gmt":"2011-04-01T01:45:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/127.0.0.1\/site\/2017\/2\/1985\/michael_kinsley-presidents_cant_declare_war_just_watch_them\/"},"modified":"2011-04-01T01:45:45","modified_gmt":"2011-04-01T01:45:45","slug":"michael_kinsley-presidents_cant_declare_war_just_watch_them","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=25397","title":{"rendered":"Michael Kinsley&#8211;Presidents can&#39;t declare war? Just watch them"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>It really couldn&#8217;t be clearer. &#8220;The Congress shall have power \u201d\u00a6 to declare war.&#8221; Yet these are probably the most egregiously ignored words in the Constitution. You would think that Republicans, especially, with their showy fondness for &#8220;originalism&#8221; and &#8220;plain meaning&#8221; in interpreting the Constitution, would have no problem interpreting the meaning of these words: If a president wants to go to war, he must get the approval of Congress.<\/p>\n<p>Presidents of both parties traditionally ignore the congressional war power when they feel like it. Or they wait until the troops are poised for battle \u201d\u201d putting Congress in an impossible position \u201d\u201d before asking permission.<\/p>\n<p><a href=\"http:\/\/www.latimes.com\/news\/opinion\/commentary\/la-oe-kinsley-column-war-powers-20110329,0,3811433.story\">Read it all<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It really couldn&#8217;t be clearer. &#8220;The Congress shall have power \u201d\u00a6 to declare war.&#8221; Yet these are probably the most egregiously ignored words in the Constitution. You would think that Republicans, especially, with their showy fondness for &#8220;originalism&#8221; and &#8220;plain<span class=\"ellipsis\">&hellip;<\/span><\/p>\n<div class=\"read-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/?p=25397\">Read more &#8250;<\/a><\/div>\n<p><!-- end of .read-more --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":794,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,40,50,202,143,149,133,617,531,616,151,667,618,584],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25397","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture-watch","category-economics-politics","category-international-news-commentary","category-africa","category-defense-national-security-military","category-economy","category-history","category-house-of-representatives","category-libya","category-office-of-the-president","category-politics-in-general","category-president-barack-obama","category-senate","category-the-u-s-government"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25397","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/794"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=25397"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25397\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=25397"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=25397"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/kendallharmon.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=25397"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}