Defense Secretary Leon Panetta was asked last week about whether Obama intended to consult Congress before committing to future military action; Panetta hemmed and hawed about how they would of course inform Congress after the fact of what they had done. Nice answer. It gets worse from there. (In this video, Panetta appears after a few minutes.)
I’ve already smashed every one of these arguments in my piece “The Phony Arguments for Presidential War Powers.” The best book on all this is Louis Fisher, Presidential War Power.
