President Barack Obama talks with Defense Secretary Robert Gates following a meeting on Libya in the Situation Room of the White House, April 28, 2011. (Official White House Photo by Pete Souza)
Todd Pierce, writing at The American Conservative explains that for 100 years, expanded presidential war powers have reduce the Republic to rubble. He writes (abridged):
What this country needs today is a public debate over perpetual unconstitutional presidential wars that have reduced the Republic and its magnificent separation of powers to rubble.
The topic has been censored for a century by the two major political parties and the mainstream media. It has been censored in elite academia, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Columbia. They eagerly supply the intellectual infrastructure to justify the global projection military force professedly to redeem the world as Oxford and Cambridge did in Great Britain to enable the British Empire. America’s dip into the dark side of social and national security policy has been routinely engineered by our nation’s elites: eugenics, Japanese American concentration camps, the Vietnam War, the multi-trillion-dollar military industrial counterterrorism complex, and, a foreign policy in which the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must.
John B. Henry, the chairman of the Committee for the Republic, has produced a new play, Republic Undone, which attempts to breach this censorship by dramatizing the life and two-term presidency of Thomas Woodrow Wilson.
Wilson was disloyal to the United States Constitution. He openly preferred the British model of limitless executive power denuded of checks and balances.
In defiance of the Declare War Clause at the outset of the Great War, Wilson made the United States a co-belligerent with the Allied Powers against Germany without a congressional declaration of war.
Republic Undone exposes President Wilson’s clarion cry to “make the world safe for democracy” as propaganda worthy of George Orwell’s 1984. At home, Wilson trampled free speech with the Espionage and Sedition Acts, which he brandished to silence peaceful war protesters like Eugene Debs with jail time or deportation. He disseminated “fake news” generated substantially by the British through the Committee on Public Information to brainwash the American people into supporting American entry into the Great War.
Read more here.
