A sadly necessary introduction:

http://scienceblogs.com/authority/2007/04/a_sadly_necessary_introduction.php

A sadly necessary introduction:

Posted on: April 4, 2007 3:58 AM, by Mike Dunford

Mr. President, meet the Constitution. Constitution, I'd like to introduce you to President George W. Bush. It's been a long six years since Mr. Bush took office, and it's high time the two of you got to know each other - especially with that whole oathy-type thing. It's probably going to be easier to do all that "preserve, protect, and defend" thing if you have some sort of vague sense of what it is you are defending.

This overdue introduction is particularly necessary today because the president, in his Rose Garden press conference, demonstrated a particularly egregious failure to comprehend one of the most basic principles of our system of government.

In his opening statement, the President said this:

Instead of passing clean bills that fund our troops on the front lines, the House and Senate have spent this time debating bills that undercut the troops, by substituting the judgment of politicians in Washington for the judgment of our commanders on the ground, setting an arbitrary deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, and spending billions of dollars on pork barrel projects completely unrelated to the war.

The problem with that statement is that we live, at the moment, in a republic. We do not live in a military dictatorship. That is why, in the United States, the military is supposed to be subordinate to the civilian leadership. The founders also wanted to make sure that the powers of the government were diluted - having experienced first hand all of the fun of monarchy, they wanted to make sure that they stayed way the hell away from that.

This is why, at least in theory, the President is the Commander-in-Chief of the military but Congress is the branch of government that has the power to tell the President where, when, and why the military should be used. The President is Commander-in-Chief, but Congress declares and pays for wars. Congress gets to tell the president when and where the military that he commands should fight, and the President gets to take it from there.

Unfortunately, this President does not seem to be willing to acknowledge that. He is, after all, the "decider," and the rest of us - and especially Congress - need to understand and acknowledge that, and do what he wants. His press conference today makes it clear that he is not willing to accept the will of either Congress or the American people in this regard:

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