The Constitution and Presidential Warmaking: The Enduring Debate

A series of presidential wars1 over the past forty years, from Korea and Vietnam to Cambodia and Grenada, has triggered an intense and sometimes acerbic debate within both the scholarly community and the corriders of power on the question of whether Congress or the president is constitutionally empowered to commence war.2 The issue of the constitutional repository of the power to decide for war is of surpassing importance for a nation faced with the specter of the nuclear holocaust, the overwhelming, perhaps incomprehensible destruction of an all-out atomic exchange.