Congress has the power to declare war. But Congress has also passed the War Powers Act which states the President can use the military for short periods of time. Are you claiming the War Powers Act is unconstitutional?

> > The Constitution does not say that war must be declared for the armed forces to operate.

> It does.

Since the Constitution is a publicly available document, would you please point me to the spot where it says that? Thanks.

> Armed forces killing people is a state of war.

Real life is rarely this black and white.

Art. 1 sec. 8 does not say that and no other part of the U.S. constitution mentions war.

> Armed forces killing people is a state of war.

There hasn't been a single year of my life where US armed forces weren't killing someone somewhere in the world. The US military has been involved in armed conflicts around the globe in nearly every year since WWII but it hasn't declared many wars.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wars_involving_the_Uni...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_United_States_mili...

Not quite. This is a great survey of the many issues & opinions on the topic that have been at play since the beginning of the Constitution: https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C11-3....

The current standing precedent/law is the President only has to notify Congress within 48 hours of an action and must remove troops within 60 days if Congress has not approved an extension. Formal declarations of war are separate from short military actions legally. It's an extremely messy part of constitutional law precisely because of the split between the power to do and the power to authorize.

>If not, it's policing then it's under the judiciary authority, not the president.

Wait, what? Executive branch pretty explicitly encompasses enforcement. The Justice Department is part of the Executive branch.

Unless by "Judiciary authority" you meant the Justice Department, and not the Judiciary branch of the federal government, and by "not the president" you were very specifically discussing the semi-independence the Justice department has from the president.

Policing, or law enforcement, at the Federal level is also a part of the executive branch and under control of the President.

Huh? Federal law enforcement falls under the executive branch, not judicial. Have you even read the Constitution?

Citizens, sure. That's a much weaker claim than what the parent said, which is "The President should not be able to conduct drone strikes without an act of Congress".

Drone striking (or otherwise killing) citizens without due process seems unconstitutional. Drone striking foreign targets does not have those constitutional protections.

Killed or targeted? There's a huge difference between ordering a drone strike on said citizens and ordering strike on legitimate military target that said citizens just happen to be in a vicinity of.

The Constitution does not forbid a standing army, it merely mandates that funding be renewed every two years. This is functionally a standing army.

> Congress does not have the authority to simply pass a law invalidating that. They did it, but it is most certainly not constitutional.

The ones that should judge if it's not constitutional just passed judgment stating that a ex-president is above the law. I think they can invalidate if a president explicitly needs declaration of war, given recent history I'd bet a lot they would find it totally constitutional.

Then the question is whether the law passed by Congress was unconstitutional, which would have nothing to do with Obama. First someone with standing would have to challenge the law and then it would make its way up through the courts. But I'm pretty sure the Supreme Court would uphold it (as much as I would want it struck down along with the Patriot Act and other "war on terror" measures).

Correct there's been several attempts to revoke or limit the 2001 AUMF and Congress has decided not to each time. It's pretty clear what is being done under the auspices of it too so failing to address the interpretation becomes a tacit endorsement at least at the institutional level. Personally I think it's been stretched to breaking but the fix is pretty simple and up to Congress.

Great rhetorical question, but do consider these points: 1. we ask everyone to do their individual jobs. In a soldier's case, loss of life is a job hazard. In the President's case, making tough decisions that could kill soldiers and civilians is a job hazard 2. The assassination rate for US Presidents is 8.7% (4/46 Presidents were assassinated). 3. There were 1,922 US combat deaths in Afghanistan (ref 1) and at the peak of the war, there were 100,000 troops there (ref 2). If you ignore all the other years of deployment, a US soldier's death risk in Afghanistan was 1.9%

Numbers are hard when they go against our intuition, but every US President is taking a comparable risk to being a soldier according to these numbers.

Obama took the risk of being a President while Black Trump took the risk of being a President while Orange

Ref 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_casualties_in_Afghan... 2. https://www.militarytimes.com/news/your-military/2016/07/06/...

Not less than the average sacrifice a soldier made. The average soldier would not sign up if they had a significant chance of going to prison afterwards.

Yes it's too much to ask every president to significantly risk jail time for being president.

yes, because throughout history this has been abused. This was the reason that Caesar crossed the Rubicon - his opponents were all queued up to sue him into oblivious on his term as counsel ended.

At the point where the thread was "detached", it is as if someone started a new top-level thread.

So the US has to declare war on Russia and China in order to support Ukraine and Taiwan? Declaring war on those superpowers would be a serious act of aggression and start WW3.

So shooting at the Houthi rebels[0] would also require a declaration of war? Would that be against Yemen or the Houthis, who don't have a country?

https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthis-red-sea-shipping-ce...