Charles P. Pierce: Washington Is Void of Any Sense of Restraint

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http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/news/a54387/trump-syria-strike/

Washington Is Void of Any Sense of Restraint

The unilateral decision to strike the Syrian government was just the latest example.
By Charles P. Pierce
Apr 7, 2017


(Optional Musical Accompaniment To This Post)

WASHINGTON—Tucked into a corner by the Senate stairwell crowned by the huge painting of the Battle of Lake Erie—"We have met the enemy and they are ours!"—Senator Edward Markey paused for a long time before he answered the question. He'd been asked if the action taken by the president* on Thursday night had been "impulsive." He'd already said he supported the limited military assault on the Shayrat Airfield in Syria, but he had also been clear that any further involvement of the American military in the Syrian civil war would have to come after a lengthy and open debate in the Congress.

Since there is no plan evident from the administration in the wake of the strikes, it seemed logical to ask if the attack was simply an impulsive reaction from an impulsive president*—a visceral reaction, with Tomahawk missiles, to the pictures from the atrocity at Khan Sheikhun.

"He might have been…struck by the harm that was done to the children in Syria, and that finally made it possible for him to realize that these families are truly refugees that we should have been more concerned about during the first three months of the Trump administration, but it's impossible to really know what was going on in his mind. It does show that the military people that he's put in charge of his national security policy were able to influence his decision making and, if that's the case, then the American people need to know what the next steps they're going recommend to the president for his implementation in this next phase and neither the Senate nor the American people have any idea what is going to be contemplated next by this administration."

I don't blame Markey for being careful. I don't want to think about a president getting so infuriated, even by an obvious atrocity, that he just fires off 50 or 60 Tomahawks to make a statement to Bashar al-Assad, or Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong-un, or the world at large. And there is a certain bloody inconsistency in the fact that the president* was moved to make war on behalf of children he otherwise would keep out of the country, which should be addressed by some of the people who seem to have forgotten all about it.

Nevertheless, all day long, in the halls of Congress and all across the airwaves, people were making that very case. Brian Williams was swooning over the pretty pictures of the Tomahawks taking flight. An entire flock of generals turned up all over TV again. Nobody ever learns. When exactly it was that the American political and journalistic elites became such cheap whores for easy blood is going to be an interesting case study for future historians, as is the topic of when exactly making war in some place became the sum total of what it means to be "presidential." But there is little doubt that, if a president wants to get off on the good foot with those elites, and if he wants to paralyze the Congress in its constitutional authority regarding the war powers of the United States, all he has to do is blow the hell out of something somewhere and then explain later.

Make no mistake. What the administration did on Thursday night was completely unconstitutional and (probably) completely illegal. The steady leaching of the war powers from the legislative branch to the executive is one of the worst things that happened in the 20th century, and the agreed-upon fig leaf of the "Authorization To Use Military Force," which is an extra-constitutional device created to speed up that old, clunky, constitutional process of declaring war, is now a threadbare alternative. Hell, the attack on Thursday night was justified under the AUMF that passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and its affiliates. There is no way to stretch that to include the president of Syria's gassing his own people.

snip//

The hell of it all is, none of this matters a damn. The president—any president—has the freedom now to make war anywhere he wants and the only real check on that power is whether or not he respects the constitutional obligations of his office—which seems to have turned out to be President Obama's biggest mistake after the Libyan campaign went sour. And, even if this president brings up an AUMF for Syria next week, is there any doubt that it would pass, and in a bipartisan manner, no matter how ferocious the debate preceding its passage is?

There has been an alarming disregard for the inherent restraints of constitutional democracy in Washington all week. Once broken, these restraints are damnably hard to rebuild. There is something terribly out of control in the government of the United States, a wildness far too easy for people to exploit for personal power and private gain. It's like standing in the middle of a whirlwind in which echoes Pogo's legendary paraphrase of what Oliver Hazard Perry famously said after the Battle of Lake Erie: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

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1. K & R...of course...

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2. K&R