He has, actually, through gritted teeth, uttered the words "I take responsibility." He hasn't acted like it, but he has now said it.
5: Exactly. He takes responsibility for other peoples' failures.
4: Well, he was gonna say it, *if* we lost, and it wasn't the Iraqi's fault, or the Democrats' fault, or Chuck Hagel's fault. You know, like if he actually made a mistake.
It's not George Bush's military and Commander-in-Chief isn't a prize with privileges. Commander-in-Chief is a responsibility, and taking responsibility means more than saying "I'm responsible." It means that when you can't convince the country to send its kids to die somewhere, you have to take responsibility for your failure, and stand down.
Unfortunately, Ogged, there is nothing in our separation-of-powers system to specifically oblige a command-in-chief to "take responsibility for [his or her] failure," much less to "stand down." Congress can try to impeach the president, but that would require Congress attempting to reclaim authority over military matters that it abandoned many decades ago. Other than that rather blunt tool, you're depending solely upon a specific commander-in-chief's own personal sense that maybe he or she ought to back off, just, well, because that's the honorable thing to do, because there's no clear mechanism for any other branch of government to pound that sense into the president. I wouldn't hold me breath.
to 9:
Bullshit. Congress can defund the war. Yeah it takes a 2/3 majority in both houses to be veto proof, but it can be done.
The fact that this isn't under serious consideration is a failure of our representatives, in my opinion. Any war opponent who isn't putting that option on the table is a gutless panderer. I'm absolutely disgusted with our political class.
By god, I was already disgusted with the voters that it took until November of 2006 for these traitors to feel the slightest bit of accountability for their actions, when the stench emanating from white house turned aegean stables was already overpowering in 2004.
And now the leaders who swept in on this wave of dissatisfaction are *trailing* public opinion in trying to make things right? The more I think about this, the more angry I get.
Nancy Pelosi took the impeachment option off the table. The threshhold is just too onerous: fifty percent plus one in the House to impeach, two-thirds in the Senate to convict. And even if those hurdles were met, what would we get? Dick Cheney. Will American voters learn from this experience? Doubtful too. There is an aura of repetition compulsion surrounding wingnuttery.
If you want to know how fucked we libs are, then read this piece in the New Yorker on Joe Lieberman:
http://www.newyorker.com/printables/fact/070212fa_fact_goldberg
Isn't it high time to ban religious people from public office? They are too fucking crazy.
Commander-in-Chief sounds like a military title to me. What would happen if the General of the Army decided that he wanted to invade Canada and, dammit, he's the General of the Army so he can command it? That's just not how the chain of command works, and the Constitution makes it quite clear that the Congress' war-making power trumps the President's commander-in-chief power as far as high-level military decision-making goes.
Jack Balkin posted a good short piece about the title and roles.
Does the AUMF already give him the legal cover? 'Cause if it does, we're probably fucked.
Constitutional detail aside, it doesn't look much to me like there's much in the way of actual rather than in principle seperation of powers going on.
Bush maintains his right to act more or less as the king, and there doesn't seem much that can be done about it. The seperation of powers does seem to rely on the President behaving as if there is such a thing, and if he doesn't?
If Congress were trying to stop him, they probably could. The problem is that he's had a majority in Congress until last month, and now we've just got a bare majority, and need a supermajority in the Senate to do much.
to 10:
Bullshit. Congress can defund the war. Yeah it takes a 2/3 majority in both houses to be veto proof, but it can be done.
Of course that can be done Michael. Congress could defund the war, could pass laws that would place restrictions upon all sorts of ways the president uses force, etc., etc. Of course, they tried with the War Powers Resolution over 30 years ago, and every president since then--both Democrats and Republicans--have declared that resolution unconstitutional. And in any case, defunding the war is not what Ogged posted about. He posted about Bush not being allowed to consider the military his own personal policy-making tool, and about the idea that, when confronted with a military failure, President Bush ought to be obliged to "stand down." And I said, sorry, but we don't have a no-confidence vote in our system. Lacking that, and lacking the desire to attempt an impeachment, Congress's current quiver of tools against the president himself--as opposed to his particular policies--is mostly empty.
to 13:
...the Constitution makes it quite clear that the Congress' war-making power trumps the President's commander-in-chief power as far as high-level military decision-making goes.
Unfortunately, this is actually a disputable point. President's have been sending troops into battle without asking for a Congressional declaration of war since Jefferson and the Barbary pirates. Of course, the world has changed a lot in 200 years time, which is one of the reasons, post-WWII, post-Korean, post-Vietnam, Congress actually tried to change the by-then common presumption of power by presidents with the War Powers Resolution. Which, as I said above, hasn't worked out terribly well. Sanford Levinson is the one to read on this point.
sorry, but we don't have a no-confidence vote in our system
True enough. My original plan was to post this as a "Democrats should be saying this..." post: forget the law, start talking about the spoiled rich kid acting like the military is his toy. Then I took away the meta, and well, this isn't Eschaton, so it didn't quite work.
Someone just pointed me to this KFmonkey post, which I feel is apropo:
"This is America, which makes you the Prince of absolutely fucking nobody."
Why can't the congress just not appropriate any money for military expiditions? The president can't veto what doesn't come to his desk and then just start spending monopoly money.