We can expect that Hillary would be similarly energetic. And since she is currently emphasizing her closeness with her husband and taking credit for his policy legacy, we have every right to hold her accountable for how they conducted themselves as co-commanders in chief.
While hypocritical national Democrats and the MSM will ignore the Clintons' actual abuses of executive authority, though having savaged President Bush over false allegations concerning same, the antiwar base is not likely to be as forgiving.
As such, let's remind the base of Hillary and Bill's militarism and their utter defiance of Congress. Liberals can claim -- falsely -- that Bush duped Congress into supporting the Iraq war resolution, but the Clintons didn't even bother. They just went right on, without congressional approval, to make their war mischief -- unilaterally, to borrow a word from the liberal lexicon.
To whet the base's appetite, I refer it to an article by law professor John C. Yoo, "The Imperial President Abroad," appearing in "The Rule of Law in the Wake of Clinton" (Roger Pilon ed., CATO Press, 2000). In it, Yoo reminds us that, "When it comes to using the American military, no president in recent times had a quicker trigger finger,"
Even more noteworthy than the Clinton administration's frequent deployments of our troops in Serbia, Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti and his cruise missile volleys into Sudan, Afghanistan and Iraq, is that "in none of those cases did Congress provide authorization for the Clinton's decision to use force abroad."
Note that we're not debating the technicality of a formal declaration of war. Clinton didn't get congressional authority at all. I'm out of space, but the specific data on the Clintons' several deployments in the face of congressional disapproval is documented (including the damning vote counts) in the article.
Let's make sure the base gets wind of these things before it's too late. Hillary needs to account for her usurpation of congressional authority and her actual abuses of executive power. |