An Ominous Growth
The post below is a direct cut & paste job from Josh Marshall at TPM. I’m not blockquoteing it to aid in readability.
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In the post immediately below I referred to Obama’s audition for the role of ‘head of state/commander-in-chief’. And as a potential wartime president and in the rhetorical universe we’re now living in, this CINC test is inevitable and important for Obama to pass. But we should not forget how novel and in many ways pernicious the elevation of this term is.
At some points during the Republican primary campaign especially, CINC was being used almost as a synonym for president — much as we might substitute ‘chief executive’ for president. And the growing use of the term in this sense is an effective barometer of the progressive militarization of our concept of the presidency and our government itself.
We see it here in its semantic form but we can observe its concrete effect in the Bush administration’s claims of almost absolute presidential power well outside of war-fighting — almost as if the president is a kind of warlord simultaneously directing the military and the civilian governments with similar fiat powers.
We need to re-familiarize ourselves with the fact that the point of the constitution’s explicitly giving the president the title of commander-in-chief was not to make him into a quasi-military figure. It was precisely the opposite — to create no doubt that the armed forces answered not to a chief of staff or senior general or even a Secretary of Defense (originally, Secretaries of War and Navy) but to a civilian elected officeholder who operates with the constrained and limited power of that world rather than the unbound authority of military command.
We’ve gotten the relationship seriously out of whack.
–Josh Marshall
“And the growing use of the term in this sense is an effective barometer of the progressive militarization of our concept of the presidency and our government itself.”
Absolutely.
the balance comes also from Congressional over site and there has been very little for many years right down to the obvious the constitutional authority to “Declare War”
Very true Andy. Thanks Joe Biden, Tom Carper and Mike Castle!!!
Super job boys!
“We need to re-familiarize ourselves with the fact that the point of the constitution’s explicitly giving the president the title of commander-in-chief was not to make him into a quasi-military figure.”
This is very important. Never in the history of a state from Greece and Rome to the present has unbridled executive authority led to anything but more wars. Madison’s take on this was telling “wars are the death of republics…” And those wars killed the Roman Republic, and eventually crashed its empire. The founders all knew that and sought to directly prevent that from occuring here. So hopefully someone out there will choose to listen to that advice. I recommend everyone read their national constitution and understand how a our government was created, what it does and importantly what it is not supposed to do.