On "Constitutional Crisis": Part III

"To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal, and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water." So reads Article 1, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution. As any beginning student of the document knows, there is nothing in the constitution that gives the President any such rights. The article gives those rights solely to the legislative branch. As Commander-in-Chief of the armed services, it is the President's role to execute the will of the people as expressed by their elected representatives. Nevertheless, ever since President Eisenhower left office in 1961 warning the nation in his farewell address of a military-industrial complex, we have seen, with only a brief interlude, a succession of presidencies mortally compromised by the abuse of constitutional power. Eisenhower's immediate successor, John F. Kennedy, is assassinated. His assassination is linked--by Americans of all political stripes--to the C.I.A.'s Bay of Pigs invasion. Lyndon Johnson is virtually hounded out of office for his conduct of the war in Vietnam, and chooses not to run for a second term. Richard Nixon, on the brink of impeachment, is forced to resign after a long list of crimes related to his attempts to "neutralize" opposition to the same war as well as covert operations in Laos and Cambodia. Ronald Reagan, with the complicity of the sitting Vice-President and former C.I.A. director, George Bush, would have been impeached for the Iran/Contra debacle, perhaps the most egregious abuse of presidential power yet to come to light, were it not for the belief among the nation's elder statesmen that the nation could not bear the stresses upon the system of another Watergate. Bill Clinton is impeached. The last of these episodes seems to have nothing to do with foreign adventures, (although some would question a la "wag the dog" whether that was entirely true), and may in fact have been a form of delayed Republican retribution for the bloodbath of Watergate. Thus, from 1961 until the end of the twentieth century, the U.S. saw a succession of failed presidencies. The final tally: one assassination, one impeachment, one resignation, and two impeachments which should have taken place. There were only two exceptions--Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, essentially interim caretaker presidents. At the end of this trail of tears there appears on the scene a man who would remove what little doubt remained that the American presidency had evolved into an extra-constitutional invention. For only the second time in U.S. history, a president would be chosen by the electoral college. (The first instance, the election of Rutherford B. Hayes, saw a deal brokered in which the occupying forces of the U.S. Army were withdrawn from the defeated Southern states. The result was the end of "reconstruction" and the institution of a regimen of state terror toward the freed slaves which would continue unchecked for nearly a century.) After days of dark comedy involving "hanging chads," and allegations of rigging at the ballot boxes, a conservative Supreme Court gave a conservative favorite son, a man whose profoundest dream was to be baseball commissioner some day, the gift of the American presidency. The will of the majority of the American people had been successfully thwarted.