President failed to meet his Constitutional obligation, ex-Congressman alleges in Petition to Supreme Court
When Congress passed the Iraq Resolution in Oct. 2002, the legislators specifically made it subject to the War Powers Resolution of 1973, known as the War Powers Act. The Iraq resolution was definite. ”Nothing in this joint resolution supersedes any requirement of the War Powers Resolution,” it reads.
Rather than giving Pres. Bush the authority to take the nation to war, Callan believes, it granted him only the right to determine whether the standards laid out by the War Powers Act had been met. The War Powers Act was passed near the end of the Vietnam War in an effort to ensure that future Congresses would be less likely to abdicate their constitutional responsibility to decide whether the nation should go to war.
To justify going to war, the War Powers Act sets out several criteria. Most important of these is ”clear” evidence of an ”imminent” threat to U.S. security. The words ”clear” and ”imminent” are used repeatedly to describe situations where U.S. military force is permitted.
In the run-up to the invasion -- and ever since -- Pres. Bush went out of his way to avoid using the words ”clear” and ”imminent”, Callan says. Bush described the threat from Iraq with adjectives like ”growing” and ”gathering”.
While some of his surrogates, including his then press secretary Ari Fleisher, declared the threat ”imminent”, the president never did.
In essence, Callan's suit, filed in a U.S. circuit court three years ago, charges that the president failed to meet his constitutional obligation.
- posted by geoff @ #