Back in 2007, a Presidential candidate named Barack Obama filled out a candidate questionnaire for the Boston Globe and, as reported by John Fund in a column in the National Review Online entitled “Obama Embraces the Imperial Presidency,” he wrote:
I don't think so.
He added that the president can only act unilaterally in “instances of self-defense.” Also in 2007, Senator (now Vice-President) Joseph Biden was quoted as saying:
The president does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.
Fast forward to 2013. Vice-President Biden is calling for an immediate strike against Syria. President Obama, it would seem, feels no need to defer to Congress' warmaking powers; he is able, in his estimation, to order us into war, in the words of his spokesman Mary Ann Marsh, acting unilaterally:
The president has no constitutional authority to take this nation to war… unless we’re attacked or unless there is proof that we are about to be attacked.
Apprently, the Constitution confers powers upon a president named Barack Obama which it does not on a president named George W. Bush. Or so believe Obama and Biden.
The president of the United States cannot be handcuffed by the same Republicans that are holding the rest of the country hostage on every other issue. That is wrong.
I don't think so.
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