Whom should President Obama ask before he bombs Syria? One of the answers being bandied about is nobody but his own conscience, and some generals who will tell him how to do it. An Op-Ed in today’s Times tells him not to mind various laws and treaties, or rather the lack of applicable ones. Maybe the awful pictures from Ghouta are telling him the same thing; not getting anyone outside White House meeting rooms, or at the other end of a secure phone line, to put his or her name down might be natural, even instinctive, but it is not what the moment demands. There have been calls for the President to reconvene Congress and put this one before them, and such calls are right. It might even help the Administration figure out what, exactly, it hopes to accomplish by shooting missiles in the general direction of Damascus.

Having people, representatives, raise their hands before you do something is not an empty ritual, even when they don’t vote the way you want them to. Britain’s David Cameron has called in Parliament, which will meet Thursday, with plans to vote more than once; on Wednesday, his government submitted a draft resolution to the Security Council of the United Nations that would authorize “all necessary measures to protect civilians” in Syria. It would be a shock if it doesn’t fail, because Russia and China would veto it at this juncture—and, as John Cassidy writes, the weapons inspectors trying to figure out just what happened need time. But our domestic political process needs time, too, and deserves it.

As of Wednesday afternoon, a hundred and fourteen members of Congress had signed a letter put together by Scott Rigell, a Virginia Republican with a lot of service members in his district, asking Obama to reconvene them and get authorization for any attack. Most of those who signed on were Republicans, but not all of them. Obama could do so if he wanted to. John Boehner could also bring back the House, and Harry Reid the Senate; it would be a mistake not to.

What is the disadvantage of going to Congress? That they are loud and annoying and someone will try to introduce a resolution tying action in Syria to Obamacare? If the Administration can’t stand up to Ted Cruz, it can hardly hope to frighten Bashar al-Assad. And if going to Congress now feels time-consuming, how does it compare to the hours, days, weeks, and sanity expended on the Benghazi hearings? Those might have happened anyway, but they got a fair share of their formless force from the Administration’s initial decision to not really bother with Congress and the War Powers Act when it came to Libya. If you haven’t been asked in the first place, there is no cost to turning a tragedy into a piece of political theatre.

What, too, does Obama think that future Presidents, even those more reckless than he is, and Congresses, even those that are more unhinged than this one (it is possible), will do if he repeats his Libyan calculation with a Syrian one? Obama is hardly the first President to treat the War Powers Act as something empty and broken; but unless he thinks it should just be crushed, that’s all the more reason not to toss it aside. He’d said that the War Powers Act didn’t apply in Libya because we weren’t engaged in “hostilities”: as the Rigell letter asks, “If the use of 221 Tomahawk cruse missiles, 704 Joint Direct Attack Munitions, and 42 Predator Hellfire missiles expended in Libya does not constitute ‘hostilities,’ what does?” Under the War Powers Resolution, the President is supposed to inform Congress within forty-eight hours of starting military action, and get their permission to keep it up after sixty days. That is not onerous in a situation in which no one thinks Syria is about to invade us.

And on this one, the Administration needs Congress—it needs deliberation. George Packer has laid out what that might look like on a personal level; on a political one, the Administration needs to be interrogated, sharply, about just what it thinks is going to happen after the two or maybe three days of missile strikes that leaks tell us to expect. It might even be asked about non-military options (perhaps something that could help people trapped in refugee camps like Za’atari). Maybe then it would figure it out, at least a little. There is a cloud of haze there now: we don’t want regime change; we just want Assad and the world to remember that chemical weapons shock us deeply. We can’t bomb the chemical-weapon storage sites, though, both because that might itself send out a cloud of poison and because the rebels, whom we don’t trust, might then be able to grab a few canisters. We don’t want to think about what they might do if they did; we don’t want to think about a lot of things in Syria, including the awful last moments in the lives of the children whose bodies we’ve seen stacked up. We would like to have been able to hold them and tell them that anyone who hurts them will have to answer to us. But just bombing a place doesn’t disperse ghosts; more often, it brings chaos and new ones. Is that the only plan? Ask Congress.

Photograph by Alex Wong/Getty.

[#image: /photos/590951e82179605b11ad325e]Read more of our coverage of the war in Syria.