“IOW, the logical conclusion to what Lind is claiming is that any brigade commander anywhere can deploy combat troops to Iran or anywhere else, and Presidential orders would be IRRELEVANT.”
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Not at all, and we went through this yesterday.
What Judge Lind said is that the legality of an order given by a superior to a subordinate does not depend upon the eligibility of the President.
That doesn’t mean that all orders are lawful.
It means that orders are judged on the basis of the law, as they always have been. Some are lawful and some are not.
COL Roberts’s order to LTC Lakin to report to his office was a lawful order, regardless of the President’s eligibility.
An order by a brigade commander to invade Iran would be an unlawful order, regardless of the President’s eligibility.
Isn’t that clear to you? You are attacking straw men of your own invention. The actual facts are not nearly so confusing as you are portraying them to be.
Her rationale was poor. Her claim is that Congress and the SecDef 'share' authority for the military, as if that somehow substitutes for the presidential authority that is Constitutionally and statutorily specified. It also ignores that the SecDef is statutorily under the direction of the president. None of these bodies, for example, has the independent authority to authorize a military surge. Since two of the charges against Lakin were specifically related to Operation Enduring Freedom, there is a direct link to the statutory authority of the president. Of course, Lind did NOT want the jury to hear this in court.
You don’t get it, Big Guy. These weren’t just any old orders. These were orders for combat operations in a foreign country. The authorization is different for that.
Congress said in SJ Res 23 that authorization to make decisions about the use of force in the war on terrorism is specifically reserved for “the President” alone. The ONLY PERSON who can authorize the use of force is “the President”. If there is no valid President authorizing the use of force, then there is no authority for anybody in the chain of command to use force.
Some orders are authorized by regulations. Some are authorized by the custom of the military. Some are authorized by law. The use of force is only authorized by Congress, and in SJ Res 23 Congress gave the authority to make decisions about the use of force directly to only “the President”.
In the elements of lawfulness for Article 90, ii refers to the different kinds of lawful authorization for specific kinds of orders, noting the different sources of authority. As everybody acknowledges in regards to Iran, nothing allows a brigade commander to lawfully choose on his own to deploy combat troops, without authorization from “the President”. If he tried he would be court-martialed, I’m told, although nobody has said what he would specifically be charged with.
What would he be charged with? What in the MCM punishes a commissioned officer for acting beyond his authority?