Those aren't "hostilities" we're engaged in with Libya -- I guess it's more of a, you know, tiff

The Republican view of presidential power c2007

by Ken

No doubt you caught the Obama administration's response to the charge that the president has exceeded the permissible "Go to War Free" -- i.e., without congressional approval -- period prescribed by the War Powers Act (1973). Here's how Charlie Savage and Mark Landler reported it in the NYT:

The White House, pushing hard against criticism in Congress over the deepening air war in Libya, asserted Wednesday that President Obama had the authority to continue the military campaign without Congressional approval because American involvement fell short of full-blown hostilities.

In a 38-page report sent to lawmakers describing and defending the NATO-led operation, the White House said the mission was prying loose Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi’s grip on power. . . . [T]he report asserted that “U.S. operations do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces, nor do they involve U.S. ground troops.”

I don't know where on earth anyone would get the idea that we're engaged in hostilities with Libya. But "hostilities," as specified by the War Powers Act? Not a bit of it. Oh sure, in the heat of the moment harsh words may have been exchanged, and I suppose a fussbudget could quibble over all those bombs we've dropped, and assorted other military expenditures (which, however, "do not involve sustained fighting or active exchanges of fire with hostile forces," according to the administration report, "nor do they involve U.S. ground troops”), for which the tab, as Savage and Landler report the White House acknowledging, has run up to $716 million in the first two months and "at the current scale of operations" will rise to $1.1 billion by September.

But "hostilities"? Not that anyone in the administration can tell. In a joint interview, the Timesmen report, State Department legal adviser Harold Koh and White House counsel Robert Bauer --

contended that American forces had not been in “hostilities” at least since early April, when NATO took over the responsibility for the no-fly zone and the United States shifted to primarily a supporting role -- providing refueling and surveillance to allied warplanes, although remotely piloted drones operated by the United States periodically fire missiles, too.

It doesn't seem likely that the report is going to satisfy the demand made by House Speaker "Sunny John" Boehner for a legal justification for passing the congressional reporting deadline. After all, Sunny John is a veritable tiger when it comes to enforcing the spirit and letter of the War Powers Act, as he showed throughout the warmongering years of the Bush regime.

Ha ha ha! Sometimes I just make myself laugh. Sunny John doesn't give a damn about war powers, or any other executive powers, unless they're being exercised by a Democratic excecutive. Savage and Landler note:

The escalating confrontation with Congress reflects the radically altered political landscape in Washington: a Democratic president asserting sweeping executive powers to deploy American forces overseas, while Republicans call for stricter oversight and voice fears about executive-branch power getting the United States bogged down in a foreign war.

All those years when "Big Dick" Cheney and his Puppet Prez Chimpy were using their 100 percent bogus "doctrine" of the "unitary executive" to expand executive powers in a way never before dreamt by American pols, nothing was heard from Republicans in either house except cheering -- and vicious invective and even threats directed against "Bush-bashers."

But then, Republicans are never called to account for even the most flagrant of their lies and the most blatant of their hypocrisies. A colleague notes the irony (again, not really the right word) of the proposed prohibition, in the House Appropriations Committee's proposed Fiscal Year 2012 Financial Services Appropriations Bill, of the Executive Office of the President's use of funds "to prepare 'signing statements,' which has been used in the past to undermine or circumvent laws passed by Congress." The colleague points out that when the House Judiciary Committee, then chaired by Democrat John Conyers Jr., tried briefly in 2007 to look into the matter of presidential signing statements, the subject was dismissed out of hand and ridiculed by Rpublican Ranking Member (now Committee Chairman) Lamar Smith.

Another colleague, while recognizing the total hypocrisy of the current Republican pushbacks against executive authority, syas we ought nevertheless to go along with their efforts, on the theory that it's at least a way to get some executive limitations legislated. It's a point, I suppose, but a point that misses the point, it seems to me. Congressional Republicans will never attempt to apply any such restrictions against a Republican president, and Congressional Democrats, as we've seen, will never attempt to apply such restrictions against a president of either party.

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