Even Repubs are sometimes right

Charles Krauthammer, MD, psychiatrist who became a conservative columnist instead (and a good thing for all the psychiatric patients he might have mistreated) is one conservative dude that I love to hate and to write scornful comments about.

However, even he can be right, occasionally. In today's column (AJC), he says that the U. S. Constitution needs an update concerning the balance of powers to declare war. Krauthammer disagrees sharply with President Obama's position that he does not need to consult Congress about our role in Libya. Obama has asserted that we are not engaged in "hostilities" and therefore not subject to the War Powers Act.

But Krauthammer goes on to say that the constitutional authority that gives Congress the sole power to declare war is archaic and obsolete, because in the modern world:

No one declares war anymore. Since World War II, we’ve been involved in five major wars, and many minor engagements, without ever declaring war.

But it’s not just us. No one does. Declarations of war are a relic of a more aristocratic era, a time when, for example, an American secretary of state closed his department’s code-cracking office because “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.”

The power to declare war has become, through no fault of anyone, archaic and obsolete. Taken literally, it is as useless as granting Congress the right to regulate horse-and-buggies.

We need, therefore, some new way to fulfill the original constitutional intent. The WPR [War Powers Act] was a good try, but it failed because it was the work of Congress alone, which tried to shove it down the throat of the Executive, which, in turn, for over three decades has resisted it as an encroachment on the inherent powers of the commander in chief.

Krauthammer says that we need a new constitutional understanding, one that both Congress and the Executive Branch can agree on, to meet the needs for quick action but with some consulting and oversight role for Congress.

It seems to me that both parties should agree with that. If we could only have time enough when we are not at war abroad, or when the Dems and Repubs are not so at war with each other, that we could cooperate on something that makes sense and is sorely needed.

Ralph