Wampum

I was invited to submit a question to a chat hosted at the DCCC's website featuring Rep. John Conyers (D-MI-14), and Rep. Louise Slaughter (D-NY-28). Conyers is the ranking minority on the House Judiciary Committee, and Slaughter is the ranking minority on the House Rules Committee.

I sent this:

Do you agree with, or disagree with, the following statement? "

Ultimately, it is Congress, and not the Pentagon, that decides what the Military is, and how and where it is used. There is no clause in the War Powers Act that allows the Executive Branch to commit the United States to ad hoc asymmetric adventures and ignore symmetric challenges, or to assume that the Wars of 1990 and 2002/3 in West Asia against militaries functioning at or below the 1950s level of operational art and material preparedness, repeated, is the Challenge of the Future."

If you agree with the statement, can you accept the subordination of Congress to the Executive, under the fiction of apolitical objectivity, in the BRAC process?

The answer surprised me. I pitched Rumsfeld's scrapping of symmetric deterence, at least on land and at sea, his F-111 but writ very, very big, and the BRAC '05 as an opportunity for a Congressional check on a usurpation of Legislative power by the Executive. I expected an answer arising from the powers of Congress, not the Executive, in Art 1, Sec 8:

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

John Conyers took the power in Art 1, Sec 8 that immediately preceedes these:

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

The pitch swung on was the Winter/Spring 2002 Bush-Blair conspiracy to fabricate a casus belli in Iraq.

Rep. Conyers:

Thank you for your question. As you know art 1, sec 8 gives Congress the exclusive power to make war. Frequently, however, we find this being ignored or modified in such a way that the Congress is no longer in charge, as I think they should be. Just recently, it was revealed in a secret British memo that the British Prime Minister Tony Blair and the President were planning the Iraq war in 2002, even before authorization was sought from Congress. 88 Members of Congress have joined with me in asking the President to explain these meetings.

It is possible that John Conyers will take that line of inquiry to its Constitutional conclusion.

The record of the chat is here. Several exchanges over the prostitute working out of the Whitehouse, the suppression of Kerry-Edwards votes in Ohio in '04, like the suppression Gore-Liberman votes in Florida in '00, and other issues.