All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
You can also sign up for the podcast feed.
The full archive is also available at youtube.com slash scotthortonshow.
All right, y'all, introducing the great Mike Meharry.
He is partners with the great Michael Bolden over there at the 10th Amendment Center, where they're all about nullification and interposition, and the 10th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and he's written this very important article.
We're running it on antiwar.com today, Friday, The Unconstitutional War in Yemen Grinds Life and Liberty Under Its Wheels.
Welcome back to the show, Mike.
How are you, sir?
Thanks for having me, Scott.
Man, it's always great to be on the show.
I love talking with you, man, always, of course.
So here's the thing.
Most of all of the worst everything our U.S. government does is against the law?
Is that your position, sir?
Pretty much, yeah.
That sums it up.
If you consider the Constitution to be the highest law of the land, yeah, virtually everything the federal government does is unconstitutional, and that includes all of the wars that are currently going on, and I say all of them because there's more than one.
Yeah, none of this is authorized by the Constitution.
I mean, it's pretty clear the Constitution says that Congress is supposed to declare war.
That's a very specific thing.
That means that Congress directs the president to engage in the war.
It doesn't mean that the Congress lets the president just decide willy-nilly, you can go to war if you want to, which has basically been the policy over the last, well, really since Korea instead of actually- It wasn't written in the ancient times like the Bible where there's a bit of a mystery here.
We know why these guys put that war power in Article I and not Article II.
It was very deliberate for the reason you just said.
It wasn't just because that's where they dropped it.
Yeah, absolutely.
I mean, the whole idea that a single individual could lead the country into war was rather horrifying to folks in that generation because they had experienced living under kings who did just that.
They would get peeved at some guy across the pond, and then the next thing you know, you're sending thousands of knights to invade another country.
They recognized the fact that human beings are subject to emotional whims, and presidents are no exception.
They put that process in Congress so that it would be deliberated, so that there would be checks, so that it wouldn't be easy to go off to war, but Congress is simply ...
What they've done is they have passed the buck.
They're basically said, okay, president, you do what you want over there, and we'll just sit back.
You don't have to complain about it every once in a while, but you go ahead because we don't want this on our hands.
It's led to this situation where we have all of these just little bitty wars that are little bitty maybe in our minds in places like Yemen and Somalia, but they're not little bitty to the people who are under the boot, who are being bombed, who are having drones fly over their homes, and who are starving to death because food can't get into these places.
It's a travesty all the way around.
I'm not saying that if Congress actually followed the Constitution and the president was limited that the wars would necessarily end, but it would certainly be much more difficult.
I think we would have much more say as opposed to the system as it is now, which basically we're operating on authorization that goes back to 2001, for goodness sake.
It's important, too, that the authorization ...
Well, tell me exactly what you think of these authorizations because they're not declarations of war, but then again, on the other hand, declarations of war might really be worse, right, where now all kinds of civil authority is suspended, even here at home, even though they're just off on another one of these missions far away.
It is sort of kind of Congress taking responsibility, like compare, for example, Congress authorizing Bush to attack Iraq in 2002 versus Congress not having a say in Obama's decision to attack Libya in 2011 at all, or Obama's decision, which Trump has continued every day of his presidency to wage this war on behalf of Saudi Arabia in Yemen.
Right.
Yeah, I think there's a distinction that is subtle to your average person, but I think it's very important when you consider the way power is being used and who is wielding that power.
There is a difference between a declaration of war and an authorization to use force, which is basically what we're operating under now.
Like I said, this authorization to use force, this goes all the way back to 2001.
The military justification in Yemen and in Somalia and other places is, you know, going after the terrorists after 9-11.
And so the difference is this.
When you talk about a declaration of war, we think of it as this big thing.
But really what that meant was congressional approval of any offensive military operation.
So the Congress is supposed to authorize it.
The distinction here is that when we talk about the declaration of war, it's supposed to be specific, and that was understood.
So Congress would say, we're going to go into Yemen and do X.
And then the president, as the commander in chief, would carry out the will of Congress in that declaration of war.
The way these authorizations of force work, they're just saying, if you want to, president, you decide whether or not you want to go to Yemen or whether you want to go after the terrorists.
You have to decide how to do it and when to do it.
And there is no specificity to these authorizations of force.
They're very broad.
A declaration of war is supposed to be very specific.
And it's interesting, if you go back and you can look at the way Jefferson handed the Barbary pirates, which I think is really similar to, you know, kind of this war on terror.
It was this nebulous thing.
It wasn't really against the nation state.
We were fighting, you know, these kind of vague forces.
And Congress made, gosh, I wish I could remember the number, but dozens of individual authorizations that directed Jefferson to do different things.
They would be very specific.
You can do this and you can't do this.
You can do this and you can't do this.
That's the kind of specificity we should be getting from Congress.
Congress should be directing the policy.
They should be saying, this is our goal.
This is what we're doing.
And then the president carries that out.
We're doing it the other way around.
Congress is just saying, president, we're going to let you do what you want.
And the result is we have all of these weird, small little wars that are, you know, justified under going after Al Qaeda after 9-11.
It really just doesn't even make any sense on the face of it.
But the issue is, is that the Congress, the body, this large group of people should put their heads together and decide this is going to be the military policy in this area.
And then the president carries that out.
And we flip that on its head.
And the president makes the decision of when, where, how, and really why, with this kind of broad sweeping pin of Congress.
So I don't think these authorizations meet constitutional muster.
And I certainly don't think that they put the check on the executive that we really need to have.
Yeah.
You know, I'm sitting here trying to find the clip, Google and C-SPAN.org, but it ain't working in real time here.
But I do remember it plays back in my brain just perfect.
When Ron Paul was on the Foreign Relations Committee in 2002 and introduced in the committee a declaration of war against Iraq.
And he said, I am voting against this and I urge everyone on the committee to vote against this because I'm against war with Iraq.
But if you're for war with Iraq, then I demand that you vote for it and take responsibility that you are declaring war on Iraq, not passing the buck and diffusing your responsibility onto the president.
And Henry Hyde said he was the chair of the committee.
And Henry Hyde said, oh, Ron Paul, I love this too.
This is just great, man.
And it couldn't have been a better guy who was the protagonist in the story.
And it couldn't have been a better situation fighting over a declaration of war for Henry Hyde to say, you know what, Ron Paul?
That part of the Constitution is an anachronism.
We don't do it that way anymore.
That's all.
Right.
And then that's it.
That's it.
Yeah.
And that tells you everything you need to know, because if there wasn't a difference, then he wouldn't have been so adamant against it.
If a declaration of war was the same as this authorization to use force, he wouldn't have quibbled over it.
He'd be like, oh, OK, fine.
You know, call it what you want.
There is a difference.
And all of those Congress critters knew that they were just basically letting the president make the decision.
And so they can go back and say, well, you know, we trusted Bush.
We trusted the intelligence.
We trusted that he was doing the right thing.
So, you know, we gave him that authorization and now, oh, darn it, we wish we hadn't done that.
Well, no, it was your job.
It was your job to vet the intelligence.
It was your job to figure out whether this was really a just.
Oh, and they did all say that Biden said that Hillary said that.
Kerry said that.
And God knows how many members of Congress, you know, in the Senate House and Senate from both parties said, well, yeah, I mean, but I just voted to support the president's authority to do the right thing.
I didn't know he was going to do the wrong thing.
They say that every time as though it's a good enough excuse.
And I guess it is.
Yeah, exactly.
And, you know, in some in some senses, Hyde was right.
I mean, it is an anachronism, but it shouldn't be because this has led us to where we are today.
And I'd like to bring up this quote.
It's it's at the end of the article that that James Madison, he wrote this.
He wrote this essay and he warned us about war.
And he said of all the enemies to public liberty, war is perhaps the most to be dreaded.
And he goes on and he explains, he said, war is the parent of armies.
And from these perceived debts and taxes, well, good Lord knows we've got that.
I mean, what, seven trillion in new national debt since President Trump took office.
And then he went on and he talked about how the power of the executive is extended.
And they didn't want that.
He said it would create influence in dealing out offices, honors and emoluments.
And then I think this is the most important part.
He said that the opportunities of fraud that grow out of the state of war, we've seen that with the military industrial complex.
And then he said, and the degeneracy of manners and morals engendered by both.
So war, you know, it's not just the atrocity of killing people overseas, which is bad enough.
And we turn a blind eye to that.
And I think that's pretty disgusting.
But it's also a degradation of our own morals and our own value of human life, because we just kind of take it for granted.
Oh, yeah, we can go crush these people because we have political reasons.
And this was the clincher.
This is what Madison, he said, he said, no nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.
Well, wasn't that prophetic?
Because here we are today and out of this warfare state, we have the surveillance state and we have the taxes and we have the debt.
We have all of these things that that they warned us we would get with this perpetual state of war.
So it's not just, you know, oh, Mike's talking about the Constitution and that's a cute little document.
But we live in the real world.
Well, the real world is being effed up pretty bad because the United States has decided we're going to be this empire building warfare state and it's not playing out well for those of us here in the United States.
Yeah.
And, you know, what's funny about this is that, I mean, any I would say even school child who's interested in this kind of thing knows that empires die that, you know, like on a little bit more sophisticated level, like a college freshman level.
Empire is the last stage of a civilization, you know.
And so even this was in Carol Quigley, Tragedy and Hope.
What that title really meant was, and I know he was one to talk, but what he was saying was the tragedy is that if you make a world empire, it'll destroy your civilization.
But the hope is that people be smart enough to learn from history by now, that if you want to preserve your civilization, don't abuse as much power as you can all the time because that's overdoing it and you'll end up screwing yourself up.
So we should be conservative in the very best way in the sense of not overextending ourselves on, I mean, what are all after all just, you know, missions of self-interest by the national security state itself.
The self-licking ice cream cone is what they call it themselves.
They're just as H.L. Mencken would have called them, job holders, right?
When they ought to be out in the market actually doing things for people.
And so, but that's the whole thing is the, you know, and in fact, as long as I'm rambling, Mike, this is the prologue to the novel of Star Wars.
It says that the great republic secured liberty.
And so with liberty came great prosperity, but with great prosperity came great greed and corruption to match.
And so the Sith Lord was able to use that corruption to his advantage, to divide the galaxy and cause a war and then take over the place.
Yeah.
I mean, just look at the course of history.
You had Babylon, Babylon fell to Persia, Persia fell to Greece, Greece fell to Rome, Rome fell to the barbarians.
And then we had, you know, these minor empires that we've had in modern times, the Austro-Hungarian empire and the British empire.
And now we've got the American empire.
What do all of these things have in common?
Every one of them collapsed under their own weight, you know?
And I don't understand why people think that the United States is somehow going to be different.
I guess people think we're special or something, but I'm going to go with history on this.
And that's why that Star Wars story resonates, because it is the repetition of history that we've seen throughout time.
And, you know, Madison understood it.
That was his warning.
And yet we fail to heed it every single time, because like you said, you get these people that are greedy for power and, you know, they want to look good.
And after all, George Lucas wrote that.
He's an American from California and he wrote it in the middle of the Vietnam War.
So yeah.
Okay.
That makes sense.
It's not the Vietnam War, I should say, but yeah.
And this is the frustrating thing.
This is part of why I wrote this article and I wrote a companion article before this on Trump's war in Somalia.
You know, Trump has this kind of reputation in some libertarian circles as being a more non-interventionist president.
And I'm not going to, you know, there are certain things that he's done that I think he probably should be praised for.
But by and large, the American foreign policy has continued uninterrupted from Bush to Obama to Trump.
And I have no doubt it's going to continue right on into the Obama administration.
And what little good Trump may have done is probably going to get unwound.
I just, you know, do you really believe that the troops are going to come home from Afghanistan when this is all said and done?
No, but I mean, I got to say, I give it the best chance it's had in forever.
Right now, in just the last two months.
And it's because of Colonel McGregor.
And later on, I'm going to be talking with Mark Perry, who is a real expert in McGregor.
But this guy is essentially, you know, a conservative anti-war guy.
And he's the hero of the great tank battle of Iraq War One.
And he's got, you know, extreme credibility as a warrior inside the army, although he's an iconoclast and not, you know, a toady type.
But they respect and or fear him already, you know, and consider him to be a real badass.
And I know he just does not believe in the empire.
He would preserve the republic by abandoning the empire.
We just don't need it.
You know?
No, we can work.
Japan and Europe and whatever, for that matter, Russia and China, we can work together.
And India and Brazil and whoever are the medium powers on Earth, we can all work together and secure the sea lanes and all these things.
We don't need to have this at all.
We just don't need to have it at all.
And he knows that and believes that.
And Trump, I mean, the thing is, God dang, he should have done this in June.
Because I mean, McGregor is the kind of guy who I think could get it done.
He's now the senior advisor to the secretary of defense.
But for the last two months of a lame duck presidency.
So what does that get us?
I don't know what that gets us.
It might not get us anything.
It might not get us anything.
I mean, I'm not hoping change over here.
But then again, McGregor ain't no Barack Obama.
And Trump finally did.
I mean, he's got the job.
So I don't know what it means, honestly, dude.
But I sure hope it means that they're at least coming home from Afghanistan and Somalia.
I don't know if he's brave enough to pull out of Syria and Iraq.
I doubt it.
I don't mean McGregor.
I mean Trump.
McGregor is brave enough.
Well, I'll take whatever slivers that we can get.
But I guess I've grown so cynical over the years and I see a transition back to the same old line of thinking.
I don't think Joe Biden is going to bring any grand new thoughts to the world of foreign policy.
No.
He's so conventional in his thinking.
Always has been.
Yeah.
He has been chastened by the failures of the last few years.
He's smart enough to see what's happened with the terror wars and everything.
So, I mean, he lost his own son in the war he helped lie us into in Iraq War Two.
Not that he got shot over there, but he got brain cancer from the burn pit.
And Biden knows that now.
And I think that must weigh on him, his good son.
You know, so I don't know.
But it's going to be.
Well, I hope you're right, because, you know, and at some point, one of the things that we're doing, I'll mention this real quick, is, and we've talked about this before, is the Defend the Guard Bill, which is a state level bill that would prohibit a governor from releasing National Guard troops into foreign combat zones without this declaration of war that we've already talked about.
So it puts some pressure on Congress and there's a big bipartisan group of folks that are working on this.
I was just talking to Dan McKnight.
He's over at Bring the Troops Home, kind of a conservative group that's trying to end the empire and end the wars.
And they're pushing to get this introduced in between 25 and 30 states in this next legislative session.
So, you know, I don't have a lot of a lot of hope that it's necessarily going to pass the first run through.
But I think this is an opportunity to create a lot of attention, get the debate going, put it in the spotlight.
Well, you sure got the attention of the bad guys here.
I mean, they pulled out.
Yeah, we got John Bolton and Liz Cheney working together to pull out all the stops to stop the Bring our Troops Home, Young Americans for Liberty, you know, Defend the Guard Act coalition here.
Because they know that it's a threat.
They know that we don't have any money.
They know we don't have any money, but they know that we got the people.
If they had access to the message that they would support somebody like Eric Brakey, you know, they would support Tyler Lindholm.
And instead, they got to spend I mean, they spent $300,000 smearing Brakey in order to stop him.
Yeah, they sure did.
And so again, in West Virginia, he's he's another one that's that, in fact, he was one of the first he was up there pushing this through when nobody was even talking about it.
And, you know, that dude just about got it passed in the House a year ago.
He's he's tenacious.
So yeah, hold on just one second.
Be right back.
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Well, you know, I got to say, man, I like to hide behind my microphone and talk all my BS because I don't like doing the hard work and I don't like associating with strangers who think they might agree with me or something.
I don't know who these people are.
But the thing of it is, though, I can see how there really is a lot of influence to be had in ground game electoral politics, where even in a presidential election like you have this year, we have these razor thin margins.
And, you know, I read a thing about Stacey Abrams in Georgia, who I always just didn't take seriously.
I thought it was very clownish the way she pretended that she'd gotten the election stolen from her when she really had not.
In fact, the original story was, well, she would have got a runoff and then they just, you know, change that to now she would have won, but they just stole it.
I mean, I just thought that was foolish.
But then I read a thing that says out of, I guess, spite or whatever it is, she spent the last years registering, I forgot if it was 200,000 new Democrat voters in Georgia.
She got her crew, they put their shoes on and they went out and beat the shit out of the pavement and got the work done.
They just did the work, how it's supposed to work in the mythology and everything.
And that made the difference in X many races all across Georgia, including the presidential race.
Yeah.
You know, you know, Joe, Joe Scarborough, who's I mean, he's a piece of garbage, but he won his district the first time in Congress the same way nobody knew who he was.
He knocked on every single door in his congressional district the year that he got in the House for the first time.
So yeah, you're absolutely right on this.
And I'm with you.
I can't do the electoral politics.
I can do the policy stuff.
I can do the lobbying.
My philosophy is that, you know, I'm going to use whoever happens to be in office.
I'm going to try to use them anyway I can, as Michael Bolton puts it, they're all pawns.
But you know, folks like Young Americans for Liberty and others who are doing this grassroots kind of ground game electoral politics stuff, we need them out there as well.
I'm not good at it, but, you know, getting these people in position to introduce these bills and to push these bills through, you know, then we can put the public pressure and screws on them and then, you know, hopefully start a movement, man.
Yeah.
Well, you know what?
I mean, everybody's so dissatisfied and yet they're moving further to the left and the right because the center has failed them so badly.
But really, it's libertarianism that's the solution to all of our problems.
I mean, one, because no, really, the market will take care of it.
But two, if we would just leave each other alone, then we wouldn't have to fight so hard about who has control of the power.
And that's the thing of it, man.
As Harry Brown said, it's not the abuse of power, it's the power to abuse.
And the federal government is so, it's a virtual authoritarian state.
So as Dave Smith actually put it really well on the Joe Rogan show the other day, he goes, if you don't fight like hell to control it, the other guys will get it, you know?
And so it just makes the thing a blood, you know, a fight to the death, basically, over power that we shouldn't have all centralized in DC anyway.
People should be making these decisions themselves in the first place.
That's right.
We see it over and over again.
I mean, we saw the total freak out on the left when Trump won, and I think we're about to see a total freak out.
I mean, a lot of people haven't even accepted what I think is the inevitable, and I don't want to get into all that, but yeah, I mean, and that's the whole reason, because there's so much power and basically it's, I need to have this power so I can cram it down my opponent's throat.
There's no way to order a society.
Let's, you know, peace, love, and liberty, man.
Yeah.
Nope.
Death and taxes.
Oh, and we march.
Yeah, that's what we get.
Yeah.
No, but, you know, and we see this all the time.
I've seen this, you know, my whole life since I've been paying attention to politics, like in the Clinton years, there were all the stories about how they abused the FBI surveillance powers over their political enemies and went rifling through their FBI files and all these things.
Remember that?
And then the Republicans were just outraged that the FBI even had all this stuff on them when they hadn't done anything criminal or whatever.
They had these extensive files, and then that the Democrats are abusing them.
So if there was a libertarian sentiment behind it all, it would be, so let's rein in the FBI's power here for the Democrats to abuse.
Instead, it's like, yeah, you just wait until we come in and we get our hands on the FBI.
And then what happened when the Republicans came in under W. Bush?
They expanded the surveillance powers of the state beyond the Clintons' wildest dreams.
Yeah.
You know, and then back and forth they go, making it worse and worse and worse instead of ever saying, hey, these abuses are something to oppose wholesale rather than just wait to take advantage of ourselves, you know?
Yeah.
I always think of, you know, you go back to, I think it was 1974 when they had the church hearings and Senator Church was talking about the surveillance state.
And keep in mind, this was before we had internet, before we had email, before we were all carrying cell phones.
Even at that point, he said that the surveillance state in the United States was powerful enough that if somebody was to take control of it, it would create the opportunity, this is the words he used, for total tyranny.
He said that in 1974.
And Congress was like, oh no, oh no.
And they didn't do a damn thing about it.
In fact, they just ratcheted it up and made it bigger.
And now today, you know, we've got these goons basically tracking us everywhere we go, looking at our emails, listening to our phone calls.
And the sad thing is, is that a lot of Americans are just like, eh, well, who cares, I got nothing to hide.
Well, you don't until you do, right?
Yeah.
I gotta start drinking.
I think that's their problem, but I think maybe I need it myself.
I gotta go.
I just realized how late I am.
But thank you so much for this great piece.
I poached it and ran it on the Libertarian Institute site.
It's at the 10th Amendment Center.
It's called The Unconstitutional War in Yemen Grinds Life and Liberty Under Its Wheels.
The great Mike Meharry.
Thank you so much for your time, bud.
Thanks, man.
Always a pleasure.
The Scott Horton Show and Antiwar Radio can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in LA, APSradio.com, Antiwar.com, ScottHorton.org, and LibertarianInstitute.org.
