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WASHINGTON—Tucked into a corner by the Senate stairwell crowned by the huge painting of the Battle of Lake Erie—"We have met the enemy and they are ours!"—Senator Edward Markey paused for a long time before he answered the question. He'd been asked if the action taken by the president* on Thursday night had been "impulsive." He'd already said he supported the limited military assault on the Shayrat Airfield in Syria, but he had also been clear that any further involvement of the American military in the Syrian civil war would have to come after a lengthy and open debate in the Congress.

Since there is no plan evident from the administration in the wake of the strikes, it seemed logical to ask if the attack was simply an impulsive reaction from an impulsive president*—a visceral reaction, with Tomahawk missiles, to the pictures from the atrocity at Khan Sheikhun.

"He might have been…struck by the harm that was done to the children in Syria, and that finally made it possible for him to realize that these families are truly refugees that we should have been more concerned about during the first three months of the Trump administration, but it's impossible to really know what was going on in his mind. It does show that the military people that he's put in charge of his national security policy were able to influence his decision making and, if that's the case, then the American people need to know what the next steps they're going recommend to the president for his implementation in this next phase and neither the Senate nor the American people have any idea what is going to be contemplated next by this administration."

I don't blame Markey for being careful. I don't want to think about a president getting so infuriated, even by an obvious atrocity, that he just fires off 50 or 60 Tomahawks to make a statement to Bashar al-Assad, or Vladimir Putin, or Kim Jong-un, or the world at large. And there is a certain bloody inconsistency in the fact that the president* was moved to make war on behalf of children he otherwise would keep out of the country, which should be addressed by some of the people who seem to have forgotten all about it.

Nevertheless, all day long, in the halls of Congress and all across the airwaves, people were making that very case. Brian Williams was swooning over the pretty pictures of the Tomahawks taking flight. An entire flock of generals turned up all over TV again. Nobody ever learns. When exactly it was that the American political and journalistic elites became such cheap whores for easy blood is going to be an interesting case study for future historians, as is the topic of when exactly making war in some place became the sum total of what it means to be "presidential." But there is little doubt that, if a president wants to get off on the good foot with those elites, and if he wants to paralyze the Congress in its constitutional authority regarding the war powers of the United States, all he has to do is blow the hell out of something somewhere and then explain later.

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Make no mistake. What the administration did on Thursday night was completely unconstitutional and (probably) completely illegal. The steady leaching of the war powers from the legislative branch to the executive is one of the worst things that happened in the 20th century, and the agreed-upon fig leaf of the "Authorization To Use Military Force," which is an extra-constitutional device created to speed up that old, clunky, constitutional process of declaring war, is now a threadbare alternative. Hell, the attack on Thursday night was justified under the AUMF that passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks, which authorized the use of force against al Qaeda and its affiliates. There is no way to stretch that to include the president of Syria's gassing his own people.

And, as Barack Obama discovered to his dismay, getting a new AUMF to strike at a new enemy wasn't any easier to get through a Republican Congress than anything else he was trying to do, as this 2013 story from The Washington Post reminds us.

The request by hundreds of lawmakers came as House Speaker John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) also formally requested in a letter that Obama "provide a clear, unambiguous explanation of how military action -- which is a means, not a policy -- will secure U.S. objectives and how it fits into your overall policy" regarding the situation in Syria.

On that list you will find the names of a certain number of Democrats, far more than you would find Republicans on Friday morning criticizing the current president* for doing exactly what the Congress warned Obama against. Not that there weren't a few people willing to at least admit that what the administration did on Thursday night was a little dubious as regards constitutional niceties—and, boy howdy, has this been a week for that.

"If you read the Constitution, it says that the power to initiate and declare war belongs to the Congress," said Senator Rand Paul, Republican of Kentucky. "You give one person too much power and he can take a whole country to war and a lot of people can die. Over time, we've had this idea that we've kind of changed the wording to call it Authorization of Military Force, but I think, to many people, it's essentially declaring war when you authorize military force."

Make no mistake. What the administration did on Thursday night was completely unconstitutional and (probably) completely illegal.

Ding! Five Minute Rule. AUMFs are simply a took by which the legislature can be seen as clawing back some vestige of what the Constitution clearly states is the legislature's powers. You can't make an AUMF a declaration of war simply by saying the wording is different. AUMFs are all the Congress has left, and this administration just blew those off, too. Meanwhile, Senator Tim Kaine, Democrat of Virginia, has been banging a drum for a new AUMF for the past six years.

On Friday afternoon, General Joseph Dunford, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, gave the senators a private briefing on the missile strikes. By all accounts, Dunford simply told them what the effect of the strikes had been, and didn't offer any details about what, if anything, comes next in Syria. Neither did he offer a defense of the administration's unilateral decision to make war in Syria. Kaine was not entirely satisfied, and he seemed alarmed that the power to go to war has become the same kind of political handball that an infrastructure bill is.

"The administration did not come prepared to discuss either a strategy vis a vis Syria, or the legal authority for what occurred last night, and they indicated that those would be addressed in the days to come. In particular, the legal authority question is one that I find very, very troubling by way of history.

"In 2011, when President Obama committed American military assets in Libya, and described the need for the mission as humanitarian and a need to create stability in the region, and to work as part of an international coalition, the House voted down an authorization and said it was a rebuke of President Obama for initiating military action without getting permission first. When President Obama went to Congress in 2013 to seek authorization for use of military to punish Assad for using chemical weapons against civilians, numerous members of this body wrote a letter to the president saying that any action without congressional approval. The current president, as a citizen, said that President Obama couldn't take action against Syrian use of chemical weapons without a congressional authorization. The fact that this action was taken without a congressional authorization is deeply troubling."

The hell of it all is, none of this matters a damn. The president—any president—has the freedom now to make war anywhere he wants and the only real check on that power is whether or not he respects the constitutional obligations of his office—which seems to have turned out to be President Obama's biggest mistake after the Libyan campaign went sour. And, even if this president brings up an AUMF for Syria next week, is there any doubt that it would pass, and in a bipartisan manner, no matter how ferocious the debate preceding its passage is?

There has been an alarming disregard for the inherent restraints of constitutional democracy in Washington all week. Once broken, these restraints are damnably hard to rebuild. There is something terribly out of control in the government of the United States, a wildness far too easy for people to exploit for personal power and private gain. It's like standing in the middle of a whirlwind in which echoes Pogo's legendary paraphrase of what Oliver Hazard Perry famously said after the Battle of Lake Erie: We have met the enemy, and he is us.

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Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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