CONSTITUTIONAL INTERPRETATIONS

President Trump has threatened Iran with full scale war unless that country agrees to submit to a total and verifiable surrender of its nuclear weapons capabilities. He has not asked for any approval of his plans from the United States Congress. The federal Constitution does not require that kind of advance approval, but it certainly encourages both the President, and “the people” whom he serves, to seek it out.

Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution provides, in part, the following:              

The Congress shall have Power . . . To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water . . ..

U.S. Const., Article I, Section 8

Article II, Section 2 makes the President the President the “Commander in Chief” of all the nation’s military forces, all the time. Nothing in Article II gives the President the powers that Article I bestows on the Congress.

Lawyers who are arguing over the proper interpretation of a hard-to-understand statute like to speak in terms of either the “letter” or the “spirit” of the law in question. At the beginning of the United States, with a newly minted United States Constitution in hand, the nation’s Constitutional lawyers did the same thing with many of its provisions. Ultimately, the Supreme Court of the United States settled on the following principle of Constitutional interpretation:

We know of no rule for construing the extent of . . . powers other than is given by the language of the instrument which confers them, taken in connexion with the purposes for which they were conferred.

Gibbons v. Ogden, 22 U.S. 1, 189 (1824)

The first Americans who approved the original Constitution as written wanted the representatives they elected to Congress to make the major decisions, one way or another, described in Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution. However, the “letter” of Congressional war powers in Section 8 does not authorize Congress, or anyone else, to interfere with the President’s unlimited power, under Article II, Section 2, to “command” the Armed Forces in the ways he or she sees fit. The Constitution leaves it up to us to choose Presidents who will take the wisest course.

/s/ Dan D. Rhea