Will: A Bipartisan Abdication

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Human Events:

Will: A Bipartisan Abdication

 

By: George Will

3/28/2013 06:47 AM

 

“President Obama has arguably established the authority of the president to intervene militarily virtually anywhere without the consent or the approval of Congress, at his own discretion and for as long as he wishes.”

– Jim Webb

 

WASHINGTON — As America tiptoes toward a fourth intervention in an opaque and uncontrollable conflict — now Syria, after Iraq, Afghanistan and Libya — Webb’s words require two minor modifications: Obama has demonstrated a power, not an authority; only the Constitution authorizes. And as Webb understands, Obama has been able to do so only because Congress, over many years, has become too supine to wield its constitutional powers.

 

Webb, a Virginia Democrat who declined to seek a second Senate term, vents his dismay in the essay “Congressional Abdication” (in The National Interest), a trenchant indictment of the irrelevance of an institution to which the Constitution gives “certain powers over the structure and use of the military.” The president, Webb says, is