Do U.S. Presidents Have the Power to Declare War?

Morse’s dissent is the most interesting case. Morse, a progressive Wisconsin Republican and staunch Cold Warrior, had been elected to the Oregon Senate but left the Republican Party in part because of his failure to denounce Joseph McCarthy, and in 1955 he became a Democrat. In 1957, he unsuccessfully opposed a resolution introduced in Congress by Dwight Eisenhower seeking prior authorization for military action in the Middle East, calling it “constitutionally dangerous.” After the Bay of Pigs fiasco in 1962, Morse described the CIA as “an unchecked executive branch that should come to an end,” and warned of the executive branch’s increasing reliance on unauthorized military actions, predicting that “we are in a situation in which we will probably never again see Congress pass a declaration of war before a war begins.” History has proven him right.

Morse so often opposed unauthorized military actions and spoke so often at the end of the day, to an empty room, that he earned the nickname Five O’Clock Shadow. In 1963, the week before John F. Kennedy’s assassination, he told Morse: “Wayne, I want you to know that you are absolutely right in your criticism of my Vietnam policy.” » In the spring, when Johnson requested a military appropriation, Morse accused him of “attempting indirectly to obtain Congressional approval for our illegal and unilateral military action in South Vietnam without submitting a request for a declaration of war.”

In August, Morse opposed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution on constitutional grounds, calling it an “earlier declaration of war” and an “evasion of Congressional responsibility”, as well as a de facto amendment to the U.S. Constitution. He warned his colleagues that “the American people will quickly lose their freedom if you do not stop fueling the trend toward rule by executive supremacy.” In 1965, when Johnson ordered the bombing of North Vietnam and sent fifty thousand troops to South Vietnam – “This really is war,” the president declared that summer – Morse became a key speaker at rallies of the growing antiwar movement.

Article I, Section 8, of the U.S. Constitution gives Congress the power to “declare war.” When, at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia in 1787, Pierce Butler of South Carolina raised the possibility of the president exercising this power, Elbridge Gerry of Massachusetts responded that he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion authorizing the executive alone to declare war.” The general view of the delegates was reflected by Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist No. 75: “The history of human conduct does not justify that exalted opinion of human virtue which would induce a nation to entrust such delicate and important interests, as those which concern its relations with the rest of the world, to the sole disposal of a magistrate created and directed as would be a President of the United States.” »

Abraham Lincoln, while in Congress, summed up the thinking of the Convention thus:

Kings had always involved and impoverished their people in wars, usually, if not always, claiming that the good of the people was the goal. Our Convention considered this the most oppressive of all royal oppressions; and they resolved to frame the Constitution in such a manner that no man could hold the power to impose this oppression upon us.

If a president were to be granted this royal power, Lincoln warned, there would be no turning back:

Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he deems it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for that purpose – and you allow him to wage war as he pleases.