Yes I know I’m sounding like an old broken vinyl, but the ‘rats really are this bad:
WASHINGTON (AP [1]) – House Speaker Nancy Pelosi said Thursday that President Bush lacks the authority to invade Iran without specific approval from Congress, a fresh challenge to the commander in chief on the eve of a symbolic vote critical of his troop buildup in Iraq.Pelosi, D-Calif., noted that Bush consistently said he supports a diplomatic resolution to differences with Iran “and I take him at his word.”
In the Senate, Mrs. Clinton made the exact same arguement as Mrs. Pelosi. Eli Lake, in the New York Sun [2], disposes of Mrs. Clinton’s, and Mrs. Pelosi’s, arguement:
That position is at odds with President Clinton’s unilateral decision to bomb Serb military targets beginning on March 26, 1999, when America [3] and NATO [4] launched a war to stop Slobodan Milosevic [5] from cleansing the province of Kosovo [6] of ethnic Albanians.
And:
Mrs. Clinton defended the Kosovo campaign in a speech on October 10, 2002, before casting her vote to authorize the use of force in Iraq. “We and our NATO allies did not depose Mr. Milosevic, who was responsible for more than a quarter of a million people being killed in the 1990s. Instead, by stopping his aggression in Bosnia [7] and Kosovo, and keeping on the tough sanctions, we created the conditions in which his own people threw him out and led to his being in the dock being tried for war crimes as we speak,” she said in the 2002 speech. Milosevic died in prison in the Hague in 2006.
More, Andrew McCarthy, NRO [8].
Senator Clinton now claims President Bush needs to get Congress’s permission to react to Iran’s killing American troops and making war on the United States in Iraq. She didn’t always feel that way — especially when her husband ignored Congress in using force in the Balkans (where, of course, no one was murdering American forces or making war on the United States).
Mrs Pelosi had better learn to read the Constitution and the War Powers Act.