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Constitution Check

One of the things I personally admire about America is that, the system works though it is not perfect. The world should definitely learn from it it as the good and of course the bad side too.

Read below;

Constitution Check: Is President Obama claiming too much war power?



Posted 7 days ago.

By Lyle Denniston

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Lyle Denniston looks at Justice Robert H. Jackson’s 1952 opinion about presidential powers, as an indicator of President Obama’s mindset about Syrian intervention.

THE STATEMENTS AT ISSUE:

“After careful deliberation, I determined that it is in the national security interests of the United States to respond to the Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons through a targeted military strike….That’s my judgment as commander in chief.  But I’m also the president of the world’s oldest constitutional democracy.  So even though I possessed the authority to order military strikes, I believed it was right, in the absence of a direct or imminent threat to our security, to take this debate to Congress.”

 – President Barack Obama, Tuesday night in his speech to the nation on the military situation in Syria.

“Kathryn Ruemmler, the White House counsel, said the President believed a strike would be lawful, both in international law and domestic law, even if neither the [United Nations] Security Council nor Congress approved it.  But the novel circumstances, she said, led Mr. Obama to seek Congressional concurrence to bolster its legitimacy.”

 – As reported in The New York Times by staff reporter Charlie Savage, on September 8.

WE CHECKED THE CONSTITUTION, AND…

Many Americans tend to assume that, for every major constitutional question, there is a definite constitutional answer.   But, if the question is how much power a president, acting entirely on the powers of the presidential office alone, has to send the military into action, the simple answer is that there is no simple answer.

In this field of constitutional law, Oliver Wendell Holmes’ most-famous quote again becomes very useful: “The life of the law has not been logic; it has been experience.”   During 226 years with the Constitution, Presidents have been working out equations on the extent of their war powers, and experience (more than constitutional text or logic) has determined the extent of that authority.

President Obama continued that exploration Tuesday night, making a bold claim that he could act on his own, but also suggesting that it was not appropriate to do so in the Syrian situation, at least as matters stand at this moment.

Both of those thoughts are contained in the quotation above.  He asserted, just as his White House counsel had done in comments to The New York Times, that the Constitution gave him the authority to use military action unilaterally to inhibit the Syrian regime’s capacity to deploy chemical weapons.   But he also conceded that there was not as yet “a direct or imminent threat to our security” so he was going to share the choice of options with Congress.

Each side of that equation can be traced directly to the Constitution.  A President has the authority to send U.S. military forces into action immediately, in the case of an actual invasion of U.S. territory.   That comes out of the role as commander in chief of the armed forces – a role explicitly endowed on the office by Article II.  Interestingly, though, the power to repel an invasion is supposed to be shared with Congress, because Article I gives the legislative branch the authority to call the armed forces into national service for just that purpose.  Once on duty, then, the forces are under the president’s Article II authority.

In modern times, an actual invasion of U.S. soil would probably be met immediately with retaliatory action launched by the President without waiting for Congress to be consulted.  (It is not equally clear that there would be an immediate military response, under presidential order, if the invasion were of U.S. facilities overseas, such as an embassy.   The Benghazi incident in Libya has left that question with an uncertain answer.)

But President Obama and his White House legal advisers have conceded that the reports of chemical warfare by the Syrian regime do not, as yet, amount to a “direct or imminent threat” to the United States.  Without that, the President seems to have concluded, he is better advised to ask Congress to go along with a military strike, before it happens.

While President Obama clearly does have competent legal advisers, he also is a former professor of constitutional law, and has surely thought a good deal about presidential powers, including wartime powers.   He would be familiar, one may assume, with the classic warning against presidents going it alone without Congress during wartime – that is, the warning given in 1952 by a Supreme Court justice when the court struck down President Harry Truman’s seizure of the nation’s steel mills to keep them operating despite labor unrest during the Korean war.

Justice Robert H. Jackson, writing a separate concurring opinion in the 1952 case ofYoungstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer, began by suggesting that the distribution of war powers under the Constitution was anything but clear and settled.  “A judge,” he wrote, “may be surprised at the poverty of really useful and unambiguous authority applicable to concrete problems of executive power as they actually present themselves. Just what our forefathers did envision, or would have envisioned had they foreseen modern conditions, must be divined from materials almost as enigmatic as the dreams Joseph was called upon to interpret for Pharaoh.”

The constitutional materials, of course, have not been much clarified in the six decades since Justice Jackson wrote.

Despite the enigmatic nature of the constitutional materials, though, Jackson was able to suggest “a somewhat over-simplified grouping of practical situations” to gauge presidential powers.  He concluded that “when the President acts pursuant to an express or implied authorization of Congress, his authority is at its maximum, for it includes all that he possesses in his own right plus all that Congress can delegate….[But] when the President takes measures incompatible with the expressed or implied will of Congress, his power is at its lowest ebb.”

For constitutional reasons, then, and maybe also for political reasons, President Obama was taking the less adventuresome approach in asking Congress to share the burden of responding to the Syrian situation.  If his plea for support ultimately were to fail, he would then be faced with whether to take the constitutional dare of acting on his own authority even though it would then be at its “lowest ebb.”

SOURCE:

http://blog.constitutioncenter.org/2013/09/constitution-check-is-president-obama-claiming-too-much-war-power/

Lyle Denniston is the National Constitution Center’s adviser on constitutional literacy. He has reported on the Supreme Court for 55 years, currently covering it for SCOTUSblog, an online clearinghouse of information about the Supreme Court’s work.

Worth Sharing; Beautiful Prayer by William Barclay

From Prayers for the Christian Year by William Barclay;

O God, our Father, we know that the issues of life and death are in your hands, and we know that you are loving us with an everlasting love. If it is your will, grant to us to live in happiness and in peace.

     In all our undertakings,
          Grant us prosperity and good success.
     In all our friendships,
          Grant us to find our friends faithful and true.
     In all bodily things,
          Make us fit and healthy,
               Able for the work of the day.
     In all things of the mind,
          Make us calm and serene,
               Free from anxiety and worry.
     In material things,
          Save us from poverty and from want.
     In spiritual things,
          Save us from doubt and from distrust.
     Grant us
          In our work, satisfaction;
          In our study, true wisdom;
          In our pleasure, gladness;
          In our love, loyalty.

And if misfortune does come to us, grant that any trial may only bring us closer to one another and closer to you; and grant that nothing may shake our certainty that you work all things together for good, and that a Father’s hand will never cause his child a needless tear. Hear this our prayer; through Jesus Christ our Lord.

Amen.

President Barack Obama's Speech on Syria on the Eve of 9/11

In case you couldn't get to watch President Obama's quarter an hour speech on Syria yesterday, here it is. We all knew and were alerted on the issue of Syria laterly following the supposed chemical weapons that were used to gas innocent civilians last month calling for international action in Syria.

Just watch it please,Pal.

9/11-01, Some 12 Years Ago!

Evil in all its physical forms was displayed in New York City 12 years ago on this date.WE SHALL NEVER FORGET. May all the perished souls rest in peace.

Personally, a day like today Wednesday September, 11 is good to always sit back to think and analyze the depth and scope of evil that lingers around in our world. How could that be?

On this date, a poor young immigrant from my country Ghana, was at her housekeeping job in the building and the unfortunate thing happened. When I think I see how evil work harder against us human race hence the need to always pray more intense and harder as well. But when evil wants to get to us, it uses our own against us and that is why we have to always be very meticulous and make sure our eyes are widely opened. Be sweet, tender, and kind to each other and evil will always fail.

God bless the United States,

And may God bless and protect us all.

Yours Pal,  

Ronnie L

From one of my Frequently read website-Socialistworker.org

Nothing humanitarian about the empire

The proponents of "humanitarian intervention" are leading the drive to attack Syria.

September 5, 2013

A U.S. aircraft carrier and guided missile destroyer (Robert M. Cieri)
HUMANITARIAN INTERVENTION may be the public justification for the Obama administration's drive to attack Syria, but there's a more cynical purpose behind the façade.
Writing in the August 24 New York Times, Edward Luttwack, a military strategist with a long career at the highest levels of the foreign policy establishment, argued that a "prolonged stalemate is the only outcome that would not be damaging to American interests."
Translation: The longer that the combatants in Syria's bloody civil war--the dictatorial regime of Bashar al-Assad on one side, and rebel fighters on the other--carry on killing one another, the better for the U.S.
"Maintaining a stalemate should be America's objective," Luttwack wrote. "And the only possible method for achieving this is to arm the rebels when it seems that Mr. Assad's forces are ascendant and to stop supplying the rebels if they actually seem to be winning. This strategy actually approximates the Obama administration's policy so far."
Remember that the next time you hear Barack Obama or anyone else claiming that the U.S. and other Western governments have to punish Assad's government for using chemical weapons for the sake of the Syrian people. Washington's humanitarian concerns are a veneer covering a strategy that Luttwack correctly characterized as prolonging a military conflict, with an inevitable cost of more lives lost.
During the Vietnam War, a U.S. Army officer declared: "We had to destroy the village in order to save it." Today in Syria, the terms are reversed: The U.S. hopes to "save" the country by not allowing Assad's regime to crush its opponents--in order to destroy it through a protracted civil war where no side wins.
It should already be clear that the military strike Obama and others are pressing for isn't about saving civilian lives. If that were the case, the U.S. wouldn't have waited until more than 100,000 people were dead--the toll since the beginning of the Syrian uprising two and a half years ago during the first days of the Arab Spring.
And Secretary of State John Kerry's comparisons of Assad to Adolf Hitler stink of hypocrisy. Not too many years ago, U.S. officials were praising Bashar al-Assad as a reformer. When he took over from his father in 2000, Bashar imposed sweeping neoliberal market reforms, further encouraging U.S. officials in their hopes of drawing Syria into their stable of Washington-allied dictatorships in the region. As former chair of Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Kerry took a special interest in promoting this relationship--that's the origin of the photos you may have seen of Kerry and Assad toasting one another over a fine meal.
Now, U.S. officials insist that Assad must go, but Washington's problem is finding a friendly opposition figure to replace him in order to keep the repressive arm of the Syrian state intact--hence, the goal of prolonging the fighting.
The U.S. has a tough needle to thread in striking Syria. On the one hand, it must preserve its "credibility," given that Obama declared more than a year ago that the use of chemical weapons would trigger U.S. military action. On the other, it wants to continue its policy of blocking Syria's popular uprising against the regime from succeeding.
Opponents of war and imperialism must stand strong against the drive to attack Syria--which would be a projection of imperial power, not a "humanitarian intervention." But we also must support Syria's ongoing popular revolution against a dictatorship that poses as "anti-imperialist" despite being a torturer for the U.S. and neoliberal "innovator."
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WITH THE selection of Susan Rice as National Security Adviser and Samantha Power as U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Barack Obama has among his foreign policy team some of the leading proponents of the doctrine of "humanitarian intervention."
The stated idea is that the U.S. should use its military might aggressively in defense of human rights. Predictably, however, the human rights violators that become targets of "humanitarian intervention" are official enemies of U.S. foreign policy, while war crimes and other violations of international law committed by U.S. allies--not to mention the U.S. itself--escape attention.
Thus, Rice has been a vocal supporter of George W. Bush's war against Iraq, an architect of the assault on Libya in 2011 and a tireless defender of Israel's military attacks on Palestinians, including the merciless bombing of Gaza during Israel's Operation Pillar of Cloud last year.
Samantha Power's 600-page Pulitzer Prize-winning book A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide makes the case for decisive U.S. military intervention in the face of genocide. Yet it doesn't even mention the U.S. green light for Indonesia's genocide in East Timor beginning in 1975 or the regime of sanctions that cost the lives of more than 500,000 Iraqi children in the years between the two U.S.-led Gulf Wars.
The idea that the U.S. should sit in judgment of other nations' brutality is preposterous, especially in the Middle East, where it has killed far more than any other country in the last decade alone. It's the U.S. government that has repeatedly used chemical weapons in the region--like the depleted uranium rounds that have polluted Iraq with radioactive debris, leading to widespread birth defects, and white phosphorous used during the 2004 assault on Fallujah in Iraq.
In the end, the noble-sounding intentions put forward to justify "humanitarian intervention" are merely a shiny new justification for using military might to pursue what's in the interest of the U.S. But this rhetoric has proved useful in convincing liberals of the need for imperialist intervention after it fell out of favor during the Bush years.
Actually, what's striking is the continuity between the famed Bush Doctrine and imperialism in the Obama years.
The Democratic White House has copied the Bush administration's approach to the United Nations, arguing that while it prefers UN approval of its plans, it has the right to act unilaterally. Likewise, Obama has said he will seek congressional approval for a strike on Syria--but such approval isn't necessary. (As a constitutional lawyer, Obama must know this is in flagrant defiance of the Constitution, but he has the past practice of U.S. presidents on his side--the last time Congress officially declared war was in 1941.)
Obama's "gamble" in asking Congress to sanction a military strike seems to be paying off--on Wednesday, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted 10-7 in favor of giving Obama authority to carry out an attack.
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IF THE U.S. goes ahead with an attack, it will be over the opposition of a majority of Americans. About six in 10 people oppose missile strikes against Syria, according to a Washington Post-ABC News poll--a sharp reversal from several months ago when nearly two-thirds of people supported military action.
This sentiment is particularly striking considering that prominent leaders of both mainstream parties have supported an assault. Republican Sens. John McCain and Lindsey Graham are leading the call for war, and they've been joined by House Speaker John Boehner--while Democratic leaders like House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid are making the case on their side of the aisle.
So there is broad opposition to the U.S. attacking Syria, for a variety of reasons--not least because Washington is planning another imperialist adventure at the same time as Congress is cutting $1.5 trillion over 10 years from social programs such as Head Start.
Unfortunately, some forces in the antiwar movement risk undermining this opposition with their declared support for the Assad regime, not only against Western imperialism, but the two-and-a-half-year-old popular uprising against it. These activists celebrate Assad's Baathists for "standing up to the U.S."--and have sought to silence supporters of the revolution among antiwar activists by claiming that they are helping imperialism.
Considering the Assad regime's long record of barbarism and oppression against the Syrian people, this attitude is obscene and outrageous. After all, Assad's cozy-until-very-recently relationship with U.S. imperialism was symbolized not only by his dinners with John Kerry. During the Bush years, Syria acted as a torturer of "suspects" rendered to Syria by the U.S.
Syrian revolutionaries have repeatedly asked supporters of their struggle to show solidarity with their calls for dignity and justice. With so many foreign powers maneuvering for influence--on the side of the government, like Russia and Iran, or the side of the opposition like the U.S., Saudi Arabia, Turkey and Qatar--those calls have become harder to hear, while weapons are channeled to favored military forces, at the risk of provoking sectarian bloodshed.
But that's no excuse at all for siding with a dictatorship that has murdered tens of thousands of Syrians just since the uprising began.
Some people question whether the Assad regime was responsible for the chemical weapons attack that killed more than 1,000 people, many of them women and children, in the Ghouda region, setting off the latest calls for intervention. The U.S. has not produced ironclad evidence that government forces are responsible. But no one who cares about peace or justice should doubt that this regime--which has not hesitated to shell whole neighborhoods, university campuses and hospitals to a send a message against those who defy it--is capable of such a horrific slaughter. It is primarily responsible for a death toll that is many times higher during the civil war.
Those in the antiwar movement who celebrate Assad are assisting the U.S. in one of its primary aims in Syria--to prevent the revolution from sweeping the Assad regime aside and establishing a new government committed to justice for all the Syrian people.
The U.S. government's drive to attack Syria has nothing to do with humanitarian concerns. Every aspect will be organized around what best serves American interests in this conflict. As for the mass of the Syrian people, a U.S. attack would make their situation worse--by killing civilians, increasing the flow of refugees (which has already begun) and giving Assad and his regime the pretext to pose opponents of imperialism and defenders of Syria, as they step up their drive to crush popular forces opposed to both the U.S.'s and Assad's brutality.
This is why we call for no U.S. attack on Syria--and for victory for the Arab revolutions, from Cairo to Tunis to Sana'a to Damascus.


Source: http://socialistworker.org/2013/09/05/nothing-humanitarian-about-empire