War powers: A place to start

Given the mess we're in in Iraq, it's encouraging to see that there's a bipartisan proposal on the table for Congress to update the War Powers Act of 1973. In the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, President Bush did get congressional approval for military action, but it was only to disarm Iraq, (remember, this was done in the heat of the weapons of mass destruction hysteria). It's safe to say Bush has overstepped the bounds of what Congress intended.

The proposal, issued in a report from a study overseen by Warren Christopher and James Baker, posits that the existing law is toothless. The two wrote in a New York Times op-ed that the law "is ineffective at best and unconstitutional at worst." True. Except that, according to The Constitutional Project, some of the suggested changes to the law are problematic. For example, urging "that some war powers authority be reserved exclusively for the president in consultation with a small cross-section of Congress, (is) contrary to the delegation of powers found in Articles I and II of the United States Constitution."

Also, the changes still allow for a president to unilaterally order military action "to repel attacks, or to prevent imminent attacks, on the United States, its territorial possessions, its embassies, its consulates, or its armed forces abroad" and more. Given that threats can be manufactured, we wonder how effective this new law would be.