By now you've likely read or heard of Chelsea Clinton's response to the following question from a University of Wisconsin student:
"Has your mother shown any remorse for the fact that her vote cost Iraqis a million of their lives?"
If not, here it is again:
"She cast a vote based on the best available evidence. Perhaps you had clairvoyance then, and that’s extraordinary."
It comes across as offensively condescending, but really it's just the another serving of what is in actual fact a pandemic of mendacity regarding the war - all of it rooted in a subversion of Constitutional authority and responsibility.
This, in other words, is just the sort of bullshit you get when you ignore the separation of powers carefully articulated by our founders.
Imagine how much more careful Senator Clinton would have been were she voting not to hand-off the war-making power to the President, but instead on whether or not to legally declare war. You needn't imagine her any more principled a person than she is. Same goes for every other Senator and Representative. Imagine all the same people, exactly as they are. Now make them legally and ethically responsible for their decision.
With such responsibility firmly in place, do we still as a nation rush into an unnecessary war on the basis of manufactured intelligence? I very much doubt it. Imagine how much more circumspect Hillary, and every other person in Congress, would have been knowing that they were tying their political fortunes to the decision. That they would not be able to claim, a few years later, that this was George Bush's war.
Rather than hoping to elect people willing to sacrifice their political well-being for the common good, we would be better served by accepting the flawed nature of humanity and so adhereing to appropriately conceived systems of law.
James Madison provides the appropriate warning:
Every just view that can be taken of this subject, admonishes the public, of the necessity of a rigid adherence to the simple, the received and the fundamental doctrine of the constitution, that the power to declare war including the power of judging of the causes of war is fully and exclusively vested in the legislature: that the executive has no right, in any case to decide the question, whether there is or is not cause for declaring war.
Were we to insist on this principle - already enshrined in our most fundamental body of law - as a people and as a party, we would not as nation constantly careen from one military crisis to the next, enriching the already enriched at the cost of countless lives. You want to crash the gates for real? Listen to Mario Cuomo:
Crossposted in Satanic Red.