Prof. Jack Goldsmith (Harvard) on “Was the Iran Strike Constitutional?”
A characteristically excellent analysis, from a leading scholar of the subject, at his Executive Functions substack. An excerpt:
A lot of people over the next few days are going to argue with confidence that President Trump violated, or didn’t violate, the Constitution when he bombed Iran over the weekend without congressional authorization.
You might think that the Constitution would provide a clear answer to such a momentous question. But it doesn’t.
Or you might think I would know the answer, since I (with Curt Bradley and Ashley Deeks) have a casebook that covers the issue; I have written about it for decades; and I served in the Office of Legal Counsel that is the storehouse of executive branch legal opinions on the topic, one of which has my name on it. But I don’t know the answer.
I don’t know the answer because I do not think there is anything approaching a settled or clear normative framework for analysis.
Very often Supreme Court decisions guide constitutional analysis. But here we have only the Prize Cases, which in the Civil War context held that “[i]f a war be made by invasion of a foreign nation, the President is not only authorized but bound to resist force by force.” T
Article from Reason.com
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