Wampum

In the 1966 cycle, no state governor, no candidate for governor, chose to run on a platform that would put a state executive and the federal executive on a collision course over the constitionality of the National Defense Act of 1916.

What was unthinkable after the sinking of the Lusitania and "unrestricted submarine warfare" off the Atlantic seaboard, and unthinkable after Pearl Harbor, was still unthinkable. The burden of running against the Vietnam War was left to Gene McCarthy's campaign of 1968, which forced LBJ out of the White House, but between assassinations and corruption by the Democratic Party leadership, and actual violence at the Democratic Convention, failed to end the war.

It took another five years to get US troops out of the Second Indo-China War. In those five years more casualties, Vietnamese civilian, military, and US civilian and military, were inflicted than in all the prior years of the Second Indo-China War.

In 2006, no state governor, and only one candidate for governor, Chris Miller of Maine, has decided that part of the burden of running against the Iraq War is their responsibility. The rest, like the comfortable pro-War Democrats of LBJ's and Nixon's administrations, are comfortable leaving opposition to the war to Russ Feingold, and Al Gore and John Edwards, and Barbara Lee. To the distant few. A shadow play inside the Beltway of no local signifigance.

Simply because the National Defense Act of 1916 hasn't had a Constutional challenge doesn't mean it is Constitutional. No President has been censured since 1837, but no one doubts that the Senate can, and must, entertain the motion by a Senator from Wisconsin, to do just that. The Boundaries of Maine have been unchanged since the Aroostook War, yet the Supreme Court heard New Hampshire v. Maine in the 2001 term, and decided that Seavey Island, and the Portsmouth Naval Shipyard, is in Maine, not New Hampshire.

Could Woodrow Wilson think the present possible? Is this what the 1916 Act ment? And did it erase, for all time and circumstance, the ability of a State to insist upon the protection provided to States by Article 1, § 8, cl. 15?

Is stopping the war something comfortably left to Russ Feingold or some other lonely few? If not in 2008, then in 2012 or some indifferent later date?