[Baltimore Sun] We can’t trust Harris-Walz ticket to defend Constitution | GUEST COMMENTARY
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The Democratic Party ticket of Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz is wobbly on the clearest and most enlightened provision in the United States Constitution: the Declare War Clause, Article I, section 8, cl. 11. Both, like their Democratic and Republican colleagues, have acquiesced in the president’s usurpation of the war power from Congress in violation of their respective oaths to preserve and protect the Constitution. Presidents will not voluntarily surrender the power back to Congress but wield it to keep the United States a permanent belligerent or co-belligerent fortified by a climbing $1.5 trillion annual national security budget.
President Joe Biden is a bracing example. As a U.S. senator seeking the Democratic Party’s presidential nomination in 2007, Biden screamed that he would lead the charge to impeach President George W. Bush if he attacked Iran without a constitutionally required declaration of war. But as vice president, Biden declined to protest President Barack Obama’s unconstitutional attack on Libya to overthrow Muammar Gaddafi, creating a wilderness in the country featuring industrial-scale murders, rape, destruction, human trafficking, slavery and refugees fleeing and dying in the Mediterranean Sea to escape Obama’s dystopia. And President Biden has repeatedly vowed to attack Russia if it invades a NATO member and China if it invades Taiwan, without constitutionally required congressional declarations of war. And Biden has continued to fight unconstitutional wars in Iraq, Syria, Somalia and Yemen and as co-belligerents with Ukraine and Israel through the systematic supply of weapons without required congressional declarations.
The Harris-Walz ticket promises the same unconstitutional presidential wars. Here’s the litmus test. Ask Democratic presidential nominee Harris if she would go to war against Russia if President Vladimir Putin invaded a NATO member, for example, Finland, Latvia or Poland, without a congressional declaration of war. Harris would never say, “No.” That constitutionally correct answer would awaken the wrath of the multitrillion-dollar military-industrial-security complex, which has dictated the national security policies of the United States since at least the Korean War if not earlier. President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the same as long ago as 1961. Harris would be just as unlikely to say no to war with China over Taiwan irrespective of a congressional declaration.
By osmosis, Harris-Walz have absorbed the commandments of the American Empire, which displaced the Republic more than a century ago. Our Empire is fueled by the magnification of fleas into elephants and the shrinkage of elephants into fleas. Commandment 1: the United States is uniquely indispensable to peace and prosperity in the world because we are God’s new chosen people. Commandment 2: Preemptive wars to destroy pre-embryonic imaginary threats are mandatory because the first step toward a mushroom cloud over New York City or Washington, D.C., is a foreigner who has learned quantum mechanics. Better that tens of millions of innocent foreigners die than that one evil foreigner eludes extermination. Commandment 3: An eye for 10 million eyes. A tooth for 100 million teeth.
As the saying goes in politics, “the more things change, the more they stay the same.”
The Constitution’s authors were unanimous: the president would be an untrustworthy steward of the war power. The temptation to fabricate excuses for war to aggrandize power would be too great for the commander in chief. James Madison, father of the Constitution, explained that presidents would be drawn to war for fame, glory, secrecy and salutes. The appalling evils of war — the crucifixion of liberty on a national security cross, the legalization of first-degree murder on an industrial scale, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the squandering of trillions of dollars better spent on hospitals, roads, airports, schools, bridges, mass transit or other infrastructure, would be readily indulged by presidents as the price of an American Empire bestriding the world like a colossus.
Congress, in contrast with the president, has no incentive to invoke the war power except in response to actual or imminent foreign aggression. In times of war, Congress shrinks to an ink blot except for the power to suspend the great writ of habeas corpus. No war monument or statue has ever been constructed to heroize a member of Congress who voted for war. Accordingly, Congress has declared war in only five conflicts over 235 years and only in response to an actual or perceived attack, whereas presidents have unilaterally deployed the military offensively on scores of occasions, including Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Kuwait, Serbia, Iraq, Syria and Libya.
In November, the American people will have a choice between Harris-Walz and Trump-Vance. But they will not have a choice between an Empire and a Republic. The Empire is here to stay until self-ruination arrives like the scores of its predecessors.
Bruce Fein (X: @brucefeinesq; www.lawofficesofbrucefein.com) was associate deputy attorney general under President Ronald Reagan and is author of “American Empire Before the Fall.”
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