Catch my Drift

My younger son was appalled, appalled when he saw my latest library book on the dining room table:  Drift by Rachel Maddow.  He said he couldn't believe I was reading something by her.  Just to show you the generational problem I have, I told him I never heard of her before and that my review would be predictably tepid.  So I am assuming her television show is the typical glaringly liberal diatribe of all major network political commentators, so I was surprised to find several statements and positions in her book that I agreed with.

First of all, a discussion about the lack of declarations of war arises more often in our house than probably most others without a family member serving in Congress.  Maddow has researched Presidents and their advisers going back to LBJ through Barry to track the sure but steady transfer of war-making powers from the legislative branch to the executive.  This is no "conspiracy" piece of work ... it is simply a knitted together timeline of several major and minor decisions that have resulted in the public's disconnect from all things military, thus making "war" based on the expediency and expanded options of one person and not a deliberate body.

And now the specific arguments and observations Maddox makes that mark her as more of a strict constitutionalists than a hippie flower child:

"The reason the founders chafed at the idea of an American standing army and vested the power of war making in the cumbersome legislature was not to disadvantage us against future enemies, but to disincline us toward war as a general matter.  Their great advice was that we should structure ourselves as a country in a way that deliberately raised the price of admission to any war.  With citizen-soldiers, with the certainty of a vigorous political debate over the use of a military subject to politicians' control, the idea was for us to feel it -- uncomfortably -- every second we were at war.  But after a generation or two of shedding the deliberate political encumbrances to war that they left us -- of dropping Congress from the equation altogether, of super-empowering the presidency with total war-making and with secret new war-making resources that answer to no one but him, of insulating the public from not only the cost of war but sometimes even the knowledge that it's happening -- war making has become almost an autonomous function of the American state.  It never stops."