Search

Subscribe   Contact   

Twitter       Facebook  

About         Archives

HEADLINES

BLACK MEDIA

 

LATEST BW ENTRIES

Login
Powered by Squarespace


Support BW!

Racist Suspect Watch


free your mind!

Cress Welsing: The Definition of Racism White Supremacy

Dr. Blynd: The Definition of Racism

Anon: What is Racism/White Supremacy?

Dr. Bobby Wright: The Psychopathic Racial Personality

The Cress Theory of Color-Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy)

What is the First Step in Counter Racism?

Genocide: a system of white survival

The Creation of the Negro

The Mysteries of Melanin

'Racism is a behavioral system for survival'

Fear of annihilation drives white racism

Dr. Blynd: The Definition of Caucasian

Where are all the Black Jurors? 

The War Against Black Males: Black on Black Violence Caused by White Supremacy/Racism

Brazen Police Officers and the Forfeiture of Freedom

White Domination, Black Criminality

Fear of a Colored Planet Fuels Racism: Global White Population Shrinking, Less than 10%

Race is Not Real but Racism is

The True Size of Africa

What is a Nigger? 

MLK and Imaginary Freedom: Chains, Plantations, Segregation, No Longer Necessary ['Our Condition is Getting Worse']

Chomsky on "Reserving the Right to Bomb Niggers." 

A Goal of the Media is to Make White Dominance and Control Over Everything Seem Natural

"TV is reversing the evolution of the human brain." Propaganda: How You Are Being Mind Controlled And Don't Know It.

Spike Lee's Mike Tyson and Don King

"Zapsters" - Keeping what real? "Non-white People are Actors. The Most Unrealistic People on the Planet"

Black Power in a White Supremacy System

Neely Fuller Jr.: "If you don't understand racism/white supremacy, everything else that you think you understand will only confuse you"

The Image and the Christian Concept of God as a White Man

'In order for this system to work, We have to feel most free and independent when we are most enslaved, in fact we have to take our enslavement as the ultimate sign of freedom'

Why do White Americans need to criminalize significant segments of the African American population?

Who Told You that you were Black or Latino or Hispanic or Asian? White People Did

Malcolm X: "We Have a Common Enemy"

Links

Deeper than Atlantis
« Congressman Conyers calls Fox News' Apology Fake- Condemns Racist Network for 'Disregard for Accuracy | Main | Justice Department Investigates Itself for Voter Fraud- Nothing To See Here, Keep Moving Along »
Wednesday
Jun062007

Can Democrats End the Iraq War? Media flunk constitutional question on war funding

Summing up the media's conventional wisdom about the congressional vote to approve funding for the Iraq War with no timeline for withdrawal, the Los Angeles Times wrote on May 25: "Unable to overcome the president's veto of their plan to set a timeline for withdrawing U.S. troops, Democrats have been left to focus on what to do next."

 That, in a nutshell, is what was wrong with the coverage of the war funding debate. In fact, if the Democrat-controlled Congress wanted to force the Bush administration to accept a bill with a withdrawal timeline, it didn't have to pass the bill over Bush's veto—it just had to make clear that no Iraq War spending bill without a timeline would be forthcoming. Given that the Constitution requires Congress to approve all spending, Bush needs Congress's approval to continue the war—Congress does not need Bush's approval to end the war.

 Democrats may not have wanted to pay the supposed political costs of such a strategy, but news coverage should have made clear that this was a choice, not something forced on them by the lack of a veto-proof majority.

 Unfortunately, some leading pundits instead gave deeply misleading, unhelpful summaries of how the American constitutional system works. Here's New York Times columnist David Brooks on CNN's Reliable Sources (5/27/07):

Listen, the Democrats were quite up-front saying, "We're going to fund the troops at the end of the day.... If we have to cave in, we will cave in." And the reason they caved in is because of the Constitution. The Constitution gives the president power to wage war and really to manage this thing. And the Democrats never really had a potential to reverse that.


 Actually, the Constitution gives Congress the power "to raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years." The limit on the length of military appropriations was explained by Alexander Hamilton in The Federalist Papers (No. 24) as "a precaution which, upon a nearer view of it, will appear to be a great and real security against the keeping up of troops without evident necessity." In Federalist No. 26, he elaborated:

The legislature of the United States will be OBLIGED, by this provision, once at least in every two years, to deliberate upon the propriety of keeping a military force on foot; to come to a new resolution on the point; and to declare their sense of the matter, by a formal vote in the face of their constituents.


 Mark Shields, the "left" on PBS's NewsHour (5/25/07), declared: "The Democrats had a majority. They did not have enough votes to overturn. Without any change in the administration's policy, the president was going to prevail in a showdown over funding troops." This is true only if you suppose that funding the Iraq War was more important to Congress than to Bush.

 Conservative Washington Post columnist George Will was one of the few pundits who got it right, declaring himself (ABC's This Week, 5/27/07) to be in rare agreement with a prominent anti-war group: "MoveOn.org happens to be right.... They're correct as a matter of constitutional fact, which is that the Democrats could stop the war if they chose. They choose not to." [MORE]

Reader Comments (1)

Lets see, Well look at what Democrats did to your race!
August 7, 2007 | Unregistered CommenterJosh

PostPost a New Comment

Enter your information below to add a new comment.

My response is on my own website »
Author Email (optional):
Author URL (optional):
Post:
 
All HTML will be escaped. Hyperlinks will be created for URLs automatically.