George Will - The 'Unitary Executive' - Effect of Truman on today's Presidency

Business, meaning research by historians and nourishment for history hobbyists, is brisk at the Harry S. Truman Library on this 60th anniversary of the Berlin Airlift, the desegregation of the armed services, recognition of the state of Israel and the improbable election of the president responsible for many momentous policies. The library is a place, and now is a time, to ponder the transformation Truman wrought in the presidency and the Constitution, and why that transformation should be debated before the next president is selected.

With a mere 15 million pages of documents, this library is minuscule: The Clinton Library in Little Rock has 77 million pages. Presidential power has grown exponentially in the six decades since Truman augmented the national security apparatus responsive to the president by creating the National Security Council and the CIA. He, however, was crucial to the magnification of the president's war powers.

A 1948 photograph here shows Truman at a lectern delivering a campaign speech in Los Angeles. Seated near the lectern is the man who had introduced Truman, 37-year-old Ronald Reagan. Between Truman's and Reagan's presidencies, between the dawn and dusk of what John Kennedy called the Cold War's "long twilight struggle," Americans accepted extravagant -- or so the Founders would have thought -- assertions of presidential powers. These assertions have been made by presidents of both parties, but have been intensified by the current president in the context of "the long war" against terrorists.

At the 1787 Constitutional Convention, only one delegate (from ever-bellicose South Carolina, naturally) favored vesting presidents with an unfettered power to make war. Presidents, it was then thought, could respond on their own only to repel sudden attacks on the nation.

More evidence that George Will has become a hack.

Need I really remind a man of Will's supposed erudition that President Jefferson - one of the Founders most suspicious of the Constitution's executive - waged war against the Ottoman Empire without any official Congressional declaration?

Congress' authority to declare a state of war between the US and any sovereign power recognized by the US was not usurped by Jefferson's action.

And in the matters of Korea, Vietnam and the Iraq War there was no sovereign state with whom to declare war.

We are currently allies with the legitimate governments of Korea and Iraq and at no time did we undertake war against these legitimate governments.

We also allied ourselves with the now-defunct Republic of Vietnam, we did not go to war against it.

There can be no official state of war between the USA and a criminal gang like the Taliban or the Ba'athists - you cannot declare a state of war to exist between the USA and a government the USA does not recognize as having any authority or sovereign status.

The executive is the commander-in-chief of the US armed forces and deploys them overseas as he sees fit.

Just as Jefferson acted under Congressional authorization but with no formal declaration of war in 1801, George W. Bush acted under Congressional authorization but with no formal declaration of war in 2003.

If "the Founders would have thought" this activity "extravagant" then surely they would have raised a hue and cry in 1801 when so many of them were still alive.

Surely there would have been calls from eminent Founding Fathers in 1801 that Jefferson be impeached for undertaking the First Barbary War without a Congressional declaration.

John Jay, Alexander Hamilton and James Madison were all alive and vigorous, and Jay and Hamilton had opposed Jefferson's presidential candidacy.

Surely Jay and Hamilton would have loudly raised the alarm over this unconstitutional extravagance. Surely madison would have resigned his position as Secretary of State in protest.