The Cost of 'Empty Words': A Comment on the Justice Department’s Libya Opinion
Harvard National Security Journal Forum, April 2010
19 Pages Posted: 17 Apr 2011
Date Written: April 14, 2011
Abstract
The April 1, 2011 opinion of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) presents three main arguments in seeking to justify the constitutionality of the U.S. use of force against Libya. (1) The President has a “broad constitutional power” to order the use of force without congressional approval, OLC claims, particularly when the given use of force isn’t really a war. (2) The existence of a United Nations Security Council resolution expands that power because the President has a responsibility to preserve the Council’s credibility and to ensure that its edicts do not turn out to be “empty words.” (3) In any event, Congress has allowed the President to undertake this action through the War Powers Resolution, which permits him to use force for us to 60 days without specific, advance approval. I suggest in this paper that none of these claims is convincing, and I conclude with some thoughts about OLC’s concern about empty words.
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