President Clinton has repeatedly committed American military forces to foreign projects without Congressional sanction. In Haiti, he moved to depose a West Point Graduate, an obvious ally to American interests, in favor of a Marxist demagogue favoring the redistribution of wealth. In Bosnia, he has intervened to prevent Civil War in a land where we have no direct interest, and no claim of right. He now threatens to do the same in Kosovo. We are no less horrified than others by the cruel and bloody civil wars that have been raging in various parts of what was formerly Yugoslavia.
Civil Wars are often the most vicious and brutal of human conflicts.
But there is nothing in that reality which enlarges the Constitutional powers of the President of the United States. Pax Brittania , in the last century, had at least some legal basis in the internal concepts of Monarchy. But our Republican Constitution confers no similar authority on the Chief Executive. Clinton's authority is to carry out the military policies that Congress decrees. Neither Clinton nor Congress has any Constitutional authority to use our military forces for either altruistic or misanthropic adventures, unrelated to that Common Defence .