Article by Justin Raimondo.

———————————————————————————————————

According to historian Thomas E. Woods, during the debate at the Constitutional Convention over the War Powers clause, only a single delegate – Pierce Butler, of South Carolina — rose to argue in favor of giving the President the power to make war without congressional consent. He was answered by Elbridge Gerry, of Massachusetts, who declared he “never expected to hear in a republic a motion to empower the Executive alone to declare war.” The rest of the Founders, to a man, concurred. That this is now reversed, and Gerry’s views are considered “crackpot” in official Washington, is yet more evidence that we are no longer a republic, alas, but a monstrously bloated empire headed for a fall.

Rubin’s smug dismissal of Republican “isolationists” is another case of wilful blindness: if the neocons have a major weakness, it’s a penchant for believing their own propaganda, a tendency that results in a debilitating tunnel vision. In the last Congress, there was no reliably “isolationist” group of Senators: this time around, there are as many as ten. At this rate, we’ll be a majority in no time.

Whatever their differences on domestic and other matters, the neocons and the Obama cult agree on one thing: their mutual disdain for the Constitution. The “progressives” sniff at “constitutional fundamentalism,” and the neocons regard Constitution-citing conservatives such as Paul and Lee as “dogmatists.” They hate the Constitution because it restrains their overweening (if often competing) ambitions, and holds them accountable – not merely every few years, at election time, but all the time. In a constitutional republic, such as we once had, there’s always someone looking over the governing elite’s shoulder – and would love nothing better than to dispense with this archaic custom.