Congress Fails to Support the Army and Navy
By Mary Mostert (03/31/07)
Yesterday the US Senate passed HR 1591 with forty-nine Democrats and two Republicans, Senators Smith of Oregon and Hagel of Nebraska voting "yea" and forty -seven Republicans and former Democrat Senator Lieberman voting "no." A week ago the House passed a similar bill 218 to 212.
While that is not overwhelming support for the bill that Senator John McCain called "the date-certain for surrender act," it does show ignorance of the Constitution and a plan by Congress to try to seize the role the Constitution reserves for the commander in chief. The US Constitution does not give the Congress ANY authority to micro-manage a war or force the commander in chief to fight it the way they think it should be fought. Yesterday Speaker Nancy Pelosi said of the president's impending veto that he needs to "take a deep breath and recognize that each of us has a constitutional role."
While they each have a constitutional role, Nancy Pelosi is not the one who has the authority to direct the war. That is clearly the responsibility of the commander in chief, who also happens to be President Bush at the present time.
How that happened had a lot to do with the problems George Washington had trying to fight the Revolution under the Articles of Confederation. From 1775 to December of 1776 the American Revolution was being directed by Congressional Committees in Philadelphia. During those months, George Washington lost every battle. It was only when the British army under General William Howe was moving towards Philadelphia intent on capturing and executing members of Congress that the Continental Congress decided to allow George Washington to make the military decisions.
Eleven years later as President of the Constitutional Convention of 1787 Washington made sure Congress would never again be able to do what the Continental Congress had done to him. In December 1776 the Continental Congress hurriedly passed a resolution turning the entire war over to Washington, adjourned and hurriedly fled to Maryland.
When he was able to make a military decision without congressional interference, Washington crossed the Delaware river on Christmas day, caught the German mercenaries by surprise and recaptured Trenton and Princeton, New Jersey. That military victory was the turning point which convinced the King Louis XVI of France the Americans might actually beat his major enemy - the king of England. It was the loans, the ships, and ammunition, plus the French Navy led by Count Jean Baptiste de Rochambeau that finally cornered General Cornwallis at Yorktown.
Congress can defund the war, as the Democrats did in 1975 in the Vietnam War, but does not have the Constitutional power to tell the commander in chief how to conduct the war. However, the Democrats have been reluctant to take that step, fearing that it would remind people of what happened when we cut and ran in Vietnam. After the Vietnam war was defunded, 2 million Cambodians, or about 20% of the nation's population, died at the hands of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in Cambodia after the Americans left. .
Also after the American army left in 1975, and before Ronald Reagan was elected, in 1980 Angola, Afghanistan, Laos, Cambodia, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Nicaragua, Somalia and South Vietnam fell under communist rule. One-third of the Hmong population of Laos, after helping the Americans, were slaughtered by the communists. The battle for freedom is not free and is not easy. People forget that the American Revolution took 8 years for George Washington to win. The nation's first foreign policy crisis came when Washington declared neutrality in the French Revolution. Most Americans wanted him to support the French revolutionists who had beheaded the King who had helped Americans gain their freedom and were angry when he refused.
Yet many seem to think the Iraqis should win their war against tyranny, write a new Constitution and be able to solve all their problems in a couple of years. The American Revolution began in 1775, the Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Continental Congress in 1776, the Revolution ended in 1783, the US Constitution was written in 1787 and our first president was elected in 1789. The slavery question, which led to a civil war, was finally resolved in 1865. In other words, it took the Americans 90 years to win the war, gain freedom and solve the most decisive problem of the day - slavery. Yet, we now expect the Iraqis to do all of that, in effect, in 2-4 years, without the kind of help the Americans received from France, which had its own revolution in President George Washington's second term.
I get frequent e-mail from people who claim, "We fought for our OWN freedom! The Iraqis should do the same." They seem to be totally ignorant of the role played by men like Marquis de Lafayette, Count de Rochambeau, the Chevalier de Chastllux and Baron von Steuben who taught ruly backwoodsmen the discipline and skills needed to win a war.
Instead of trying to usurp the role of commander in chief, Rep. Pelosi and Sen. Reid are the ones who need to calm down and do their job. While they both voted for the resolutions that took this nation into Iraq, their role now under the Constitution is to raise and support (finance) the army and navy, define and punish "piracies and felonies committed on the high seas and offences against the law of nations."
Since we very definitely have been attacked by terrorists that have committed piracies and offences against the law of nations, it is clearly Congress, not the President, that is not doing their job.
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