Hey y'all, so here's the thing, I'm giving a speech to the Tarrant County Libertarian Party on April the 28th, that's Saturday, April the 28th, from 2 to 4, Central Time, up there in Fort Worth, so if you're anywhere near the 200 square miles of concrete known as Dallas-Fort Worth, head on out there, and I'll see you, it'll be cool.
I'll sell you a book.
Oh, you can find out all about it at eventbrite.com.
Oh, and I guess I'll write up a blog entry too at the Libertarian Institute and at scotthorton.org.
Sorry I'm late, I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and give the finger to FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America, and by God, we've kicked Vietnam Syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had, you've been took, you've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw us, and he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN, like, say our name, bitch, say it, say it three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, introducing our good friend, Thomas E. Woods.
Tomwoods.com is this great website.
Of course, he's the author of about half the books that have ever been published, including Roll Back, and which is the latest, Tom?
Latest is Real Dissent.
Real Dissent.
A Libertarian Sets Fire to the Index Card of Allowable Opinions.
Yeah, exactly.
See what I mean, everybody?
Yeah, and he does a great podcast interview show at Tom Woods.
One of the most, well, probably the most popular libertarian podcast that you could find anywhere, and he's good on just about everything.
How are you?
Welcome back.
Glad to be here, Scott.
Thanks.
Yeah, man.
It's good to talk to you again.
Lately, it's been the other way around where you interview me on your show, but I'm glad to have you here.
Well, because you have a lot more to contribute, so that's why it's a little bit skewed.
That's not exactly true.
What happened was I got out of the habit of interviewing you back when you were too busy to have any time to do my show at all, and then so now I got to get back in.
Yeah, I went through a period where I wasn't doing anybody's show.
I don't care who you are.
Exactly.
I could not do it, but I'm liberated from that now.
Yeah, well, and it was for good reason, because you were writing all these great books and stuff.
Those days are behind me.
All right, what do we want to talk about?
Yeah, well, so listen, this clip isn't nearly as good as I thought it was from my memory banks in my brain here, but I found this clip.
It's my favorite short little soundbite from the movie JFK.
It's Donald Sutherland as Mr. X, which is Fletcher Prouty, talking to Jim Garrison on the park bench in Washington, D.C., Tom, and he says...
The organizing principle of any society, Mr. Garrison, is for war.
The authority of the state over its people resides in its war powers.
And then, of course, the point being, the claim being that Kennedy didn't want to escalate in Vietnam, and so that's why the army killed him.
Plausible enough.
So anyway, but my point being that, yeah, that really is right, huh?
And when I was 14, I think I was 14, may have been 15, when I first saw JFK, out of all of the junk in that movie, that's the line that really stuck out to me, that all the marble monuments and this, that, and the other thing, social security payments for grandma and roads and whatever else they dress it up in, the USA, first and foremost, is an army, right?
Well, yeah, and I mean, it's one of these things where the progressives are kind of right when they say, isn't it funny how they hem and haw about the constraints they're under financially, and that's why we can't have school breakfasts or whatever.
But man, they find that money instantaneously when there's some ridiculous pretext for launching a war, that no problem finding the money for that.
So there is something to that, right?
And secondly, as I've gotten older, I've become, I think justifiably, much more cynical about how I look at it.
I used to think that some of these people are probably sincere and they think they're making the world a better place.
They're just misguided.
Well, I think some of the grassroots, regular person supporters of these wars probably don't know any better.
They haven't read much.
They just, they trust certain people and they shouldn't, but the people who are actually, you know, fashioning these policies and crafting them, I just, I now consider it an impossibility that their absolute impossibility that their motives are good, that it is entirely a thing about increasing power, money, influence, remaking the world.
It has nothing whatsoever to do with their deep, profound care for people around the world.
I mean, you've got to be kidding me.
And yet with this Syria bombing, I was hearing from all kinds of people, look, if the U.S. doesn't do this, who's going to punish these evildoers?
Like there's still, it's like none of the foreign policy of the past 16 years or so even occurred that they're still acting.
They're still in this la la land.
I'm still picking my jaw up off the floor from Juan Cole coming out in support of the attack on Libya in 2011.
And I'm going, wait, after all we've been through?
After, after the example set by the American empire, after a million dead in Iraq war two, you're in favor of the Pentagon doing anything to anyone under any circumstances?
How could it be?
And, but hey, you know, history began yesterday, I guess.
Yeah.
Right.
Right.
And, and let's, let's sit around and pretend that any fool can't see exactly what's going to happen.
Right.
Yeah.
That's well, and that's where we get to the other agendas and all that.
So, you know what, let's, let's get back to Syria.
Cause we've got a lot to talk about, about the, the war powers in Syria and all this, but you know, you talk about the, the money in the budget and all that.
Anthony Gregory used to say that, you know, conservatives want limited government.
They want government limited to the very worst things it does.
Imprisoning people and bombing them.
But you know, money for grandma is just on the face.
That's creeping socialism, you know, or whatever, any, anything other than paying merciless killers to inflict violence on people.
And yet, you know, I guess the idea is that it's all very necessary.
You got to have the minarchists say, Tom, you have to have at least enough government to prevent a worse one from replacing it.
Right.
It needs that violent power to keep itself limited.
Yeah.
And then you notice that in practice it never works.
Where are all these limited governments in practice around the world?
Where are they?
And the United States was in a particularly enviable position starting off with a, a fresh constitution and kind of wiping the slate clean.
I mean, okay, obviously they're carrying on some traditions from the past, but basically they've written a constitution.
They've made clear what the powers are.
Everybody debated it.
Everybody understood what it meant.
And then already, already in 1790, Patrick Henry is saying, boy, this thing is a big failure.
We've got to think about revolting against this thing or, or, or, you know, fighting back.
Clearly it's gone beyond the powers we gave it.
You know, this was like 10 minutes later.
So there is this problem that it seems utopian to think that you're going to keep this thing limited.
As I said, Patrick Henry is already complaining in the 1790s that it's just coming up with, because he sees what Alexander Hamilton is up to, of course.
So he, he says, ah, geez, it was a bait and switch.
They said, oh, don't worry about it, everybody.
It's just like every single government program ever since.
Don't worry about this program.
It's going to be super limited and it's only going to cost $57.
Now that could be a social program or it could be a war.
It could be like the Iraq war.
Don't worry about that, Scott.
The, the oil revenues are going to pay for that.
You know, it happens over and over and over again.
And then the opposite happens and nobody gets fired.
Nobody's punished.
Nobody is shamed.
I mean, who actually, as a result of the Iraq war, was actually shamed?
I mean, of all things to be shamed about, you would think that would be way up there.
But no, these people are still commentators on television and nobody bats an eye.
Yeah.
Only Peter Beinart.
And it was only his own conscience.
He wrote two books about how wrong he was because he was just like, oh my God, what have I done?
Right?
Or Walter Jones, right?
Walter Jones is the other example.
The fact that you and I can name the entire run of examples, it's not good.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a real problem.
All right.
So now 1999, I'm on Free Radio Austin with mostly a bunch of earth firsters and hippies and weirdos and it was great.
And a lot of really good people there.
And I was arguing with Copperhead, was his name, and he was an anarcho-syndicalist, right?
Like Chomsky, anarcho-communist, really, right?
So I say to him, well, but look, man, socialism with a police force is communism.
So, you know, you say you're going to have all this collective ownership, this, that, the other thing, but without enforcement, it can't work.
And with enforcement, then we're all just living under a mouse.
So what the hell?
And he says, okay, fine.
But capitalism with a police force is fascism.
And I said to him, you got me.
Because isn't that right?
Don't we live now under what Robert Higgs calls a participatory fascism?
And isn't that what Alexander Hamilton's constitution and Henry Clay's American system is all about in the first place?
Was basically transferring wealth, redistributing wealth, as right-wingers say, from poor people to rich people.
And, you know, war.
Permanent war.
And it seems to happen across the board.
This will be the third time in a week I've used this example.
But I'm going to use this example until I drop dead because it's so perfect.
Even when we think about a policy, and of course all these policies have to be carried out through violence.
Nobody is going to voluntarily do any of this stuff.
But even a policy like tariffs where we're taught that, well, this will help people who have been ravaged by globalism.
And so we want to help these American workers.
The trouble there is, I like this example.
In 2012, Barack Obama congratulated himself for, he said, saving 1,200 jobs by limiting the importation of Chinese tires.
And he saved 1,200 tire makers jobs.
People thought, well, that's pretty good, got to hand it to him.
Okay, well, how much did it cost to save those jobs?
Like, it was either 1,000 or 1,200 depending on who you listen to.
It cost about $1.2 billion to save those jobs in terms of how much more tires wound up costing.
So it ended up being like over $900,000 per job saved.
So, wow, that's a lot of money to save one job.
Especially when the job only pays $40,000 a year.
So what happened to the other $860,000?
Where did that wind up?
It wound up in the pockets of the people at the corporate level in the tire companies.
They are the ones who got the big gains.
But the workers who were supposedly being protected got maybe 5% of the gains.
And that is what happens in case after case of we're just going to help this group.
Because they can't be honest about the people they're actually helping half the time.
Now, in terms of the police in general, the thing is we have to try to think about in a free society, which of these institutions would we still have and which would we not?
I mean, certainly we would not have a DEA in a free society.
We would have some form of self-defense and some kind of a defense service.
But it would be carrying out, you know, they'd be fighting against crimes of aggression.
They'd be fighting against people who, you know, kill you or punch you in the face or whatever.
Whereas at this point, you have this crazy raft of victimless crime laws and convoluted regulations that it's the job of this enforcement force to carry out.
And so I wouldn't say, well, I want to privatize that because if the state is making the laws or great many of them unjust, I don't want a more efficient force carrying them out.
I want the least efficient, most bumbling force we could possibly come up with to carry those out.
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Well, I mean, and this is the thing, too, and I don't know why it took so long, but it was actually hanging out with friends, Adam and Jennifer, on the Contra Cruise last year where it finally clicked in my brain how to describe this discrepancy better because people use the term privatize to mean government contracting as well as just government getting out of an area and letting private companies take it over.
I always used to joke that we need to spell one with an S instead of a Z or something like the British spelling.
Is that it?
And then that way one means one thing and the other means the other?
But no, it's contracting.
That's the point.
Government contracting.
Simple to the point.
That's what Adam was saying.
And I went, of course, yes.
That's a huge, entirely separate question from actual privatization.
Yeah, and that's why I don't want to privatize the TSA, for example.
Why would I want a private company carrying out the dictates of the government?
In what way is that privatization?
The real privatization would be let the different airlines decide what mix of security and frankly invasiveness they think is necessary to keep people safe and then people can naturally sort themselves out.
People who want to have a hand down their pants can go that route and people who are interested in airlines whose technology is good enough that they don't need to put their hand down your pants, they can go to that one.
Whatever.
And we'll compete on cost and convenience and whatever and we'll just see, let the best company win.
But that's the farthest thing from their minds, of course.
Right.
Well, of course, it was government regulations that said if anybody ever tries to hijack your plane, don't worry.
They just want to fly you to Cuba, so don't resist them.
Those were the government regulations in the first place.
That's never going to happen again.
Somebody tries to hijack, well, we've seen what's happened when, I guess it's only been crazy people, not actual terrorists, but a few different crazy people have tried to hijack planes in the last dozen years or so and the passengers either beat the hell out of them or in a couple of cases they suffocate a guy to death, just sat on his chest and no hijacking for you.
And TSA, of course, has nothing to do with protecting people in a situation like that.
Never did.
But now here's the real deal, though.
The economics of the military-industrial complex, and Nick Terse wrote this book, The Complex, where, of course, it's the military, industrial, congressional, think tank, academic, scientific, everything.
Toothpaste and tube socks and shoelaces and army boots and every part of American capitalism that can get in on militarism, they do.
Because it's the biggest honeypot in the history of the world, a trillion dollars a year spent on American militarism.
And you can invest, you know, I bring this one up constantly, where there was a story like, oh my God, can you believe it?
Lockheed Martin spent $14 million.
Can you see Mike Myers doing the pinky to the corner of his mouth?
$14 million in one quarter lobbying Congress.
Yeah, but they take home $50 billion a year in government contracts.
That's nothing.
That's a few steak dinners, a couple of escorts, and some cocaine for some Republican and Democrat congressmen.
And then they get to cash in.
They've collected a trillion and a half dollars on the F-35.
That's not fast, can't climb, can't turn, isn't stealth, is worthless compared to an F-15 or an F-16.
And they just continue on, just taking our money.
And there's no force well-financed enough to be organized enough to stop them.
It's just the dirtiest snowball rolling downhill.
And, you know, when we talk about the genocide going on in Yemen, everybody knows that this is about weapon sales to the Saudis.
It's like one-third of the motive for doing this.
It's just to empty bomb inventories and refill them again, Tom.
We could also mention, by the way, that there's a domestic analog to this in the homeland security industry that just— I wish I could remember.
I was trying to find the statistic.
But the number of firms that show up now at these trade shows for homeland security, it's thousands.
It's insane where it's gone from, you know, maybe there was a dozen to now everybody wants a piece of the action.
And that's the domestic analog of what you're talking about.
But, yeah, all you got to do—I mean, if you look at the economics of any of this, it's ridiculous.
Every 15 or 20 years, they have a blue-ribbon commission to try to figure out why costs go up so dramatically in that sector.
And sometimes those commissions come up with some reasonable conclusions.
But the point is nobody ever does anything about it because, as you say, that's why they exist.
They're there for the sake of getting inflated contracts and enriching themselves.
And I know—I mean this—I'm talking like people I would have thought were crazy years ago.
But it turns out that, as in many cases, the crazy people are the ones running the show, and the people who are complaining about it are the normal people.
But, I mean, this is also true when you just look at the way they carry out a lot of these projects.
They make sure that some big military project is spread out among as many congressional districts as possible, preferably in districts that have committee chairmen as congressmen, so that once it turns out that the project is a big boondoggle and everybody knows it can't work, the vested interests and the profits from it and the jobs are so spread out that good luck trying to generate any real opposition to it inside Congress.
And so it just gets—it keeps going and going and going.
They have this down to a science.
They're not doing this by accident.
They know exactly what they're doing.
And then, meanwhile, you've got so-called conservatives who are concerned about a $10,000 pork barrel project in Washington, D.C. or something.
I mean, how brain-dead can you be?
Right.
You know, I'm sure you saw this, I guess probably a year ago or something, where Kelly Vlahost did this thing in the American Conservative Magazine about— and I guess we've all heard this statistic here, there and the other place about how whatever the number is, some huge percentage of the most wealthy counties and districts in America are all right surrounding Washington, D.C.
And then Kelly Vlahost's article was about how they are taking bulldozers to these upper-middle-class neighborhoods full of very nice homes, just so they can build even bigger mansions on top of these perfectly good houses, you know, whatever.
And they're just spreading McMansions mile after mile after mile in this two-thirds radius around Washington, D.C. there.
And, of course, the people involved in all this don't even know that it's shameful.
If you go to D.C., aren't you ever impressed when you go to D.C. and you see Lockheed, BAE Systems, and Raytheon on top of these gigantic buildings and everything?
They're not shy at all about their great success at the business that they're in.
And then, as you say, the Homeland Security industrial complex, which is almost as large as the military industrial complex now, just grown up in the last 15 years.
I wonder if you think there's any way to stop this, other than, I guess like Ron Paul says, wait around for the dollar to break someday.
Because it sure seems like the economics of the system are almost impenetrable.
Yeah, I think it's very, very difficult because it's not even the economics.
It's then also they reinforce it culturally with the militarization of everything, you know, from the Super Bowl down to the airline flight you took the other day, where you stood up to respect the soldiers on board.
It's very, very hard to crack through that when even mainstream Democrats will stand up and salute for the military because everybody knows somebody who's in the military.
I think that's part of the reason they like having so many people in it because that way it makes a lot of people feel like, I can't really fully, full-throatedly oppose the military because then I'll be opposing good old Joe over here.
And I know Joe is a good guy.
So it gives everybody kind of vested interest in perpetuating the system.
And they don't view it as being exploited by a bunch of sociopathic liars who are getting rich at their expense.
That one sentence that I just said, if we could get that into their heads, that'd be a big help.
But it really, really is a struggle.
Now, one, if I may, in a bit self-interested manner here, point out one little bright light.
I just can't resist it.
Scott, I don't remember if I ever told you this story, but about a year ago, I guess, my at that time 13-year-old daughter, Regina, said that a representative from Lockheed Martin, which they have a big facility down here in Florida, was coming to their school because their teacher, who was ex-military, was bringing him in.
Who knows why?
And she said, we're going to be allowed to ask him questions.
And, of course, the kids are going to all be asking him, hey, how fast do your whatevers fly or whatever?
And she wanted to ask something else.
And I said, well, let's sit down and formulate a good question.
And so the question we came up with and that she asked him was, do you think the American people should be concerned that there seems to be a revolving door between the military industry and government such that people from Lockheed Martin or some way associated with Lockheed Martin wind up advocating military policies and buildups that appear to benefit Lockheed Martin financially?
Now, that was not the question.
And what grade is she in again?
She was in eighth grade at the time.
He wasn't prepared for that.
So he gave some mealy-mouthed answer.
He's looking at the clock.
How can I get out of here?
But I was so proud of her at that moment that she had the guts to ask an intimidating person that kind of question.
Yeah, that's awesome.
Yeah.
He certainly was not expecting to be challenged like that.
No, no, no.
So, I mean, look, the thing – I guess it's one of these things where the Internet has kind of disappointed me in that it makes so much knowledge available that you would think any sincere seeker of the truth now kind of has no excuse for not knowing the truth.
And yet it hasn't led to as much of an upending of the establishment as it really should have in light of the information that it's spreading around.
And so I have to admit I'm a bit puzzled as to what more can be done.
Yeah, it's partisanship, man.
It just kills everybody's brain.
So stupid.
It just makes everybody – Oh, yeah.
When I saw that guy Richard – now I can't think of his name – the senator from Connecticut saying, well, Trump should have gotten congressional approval for Syria, I thought, look, I haven't checked, but how did this guy feel under Obama?
I have a funny feeling he honestly couldn't have cared less.
Well, and, of course, Justin Amash tweeted out this poll that showed the other side of that, which was that the Republicans absolutely opposed Obama.
And this is the – not necessarily the congressman.
The congressman, too, I guess, but this is – the poll was of the conservative Republican voters and that kind of thing.
They absolutely opposed the exact same situation in 2013 and then by a super majority support Trump if he's bombing Assad.
So, you know, everybody flip-flops around.
But then, of course, you know, the libertarians, we stay good on everything all the time, and so people notice that.
So in the end, it's better for liberty, I guess, that – I prefer the easy way, don't get me wrong.
People would just listen and be convinced by superior arguments without these crises.
But people – you know, there are a lot of people who are libertarians now because Barack Obama, they thought, was going to end the wars and then he didn't.
And they said, wait a minute, I need to find out what's going on around here.
And they ended up becoming Ron Paulians and Tom Woodsians.
And then the same thing, of course, is happening with Trump people now who go, man, we thought this guy – you know, he didn't hire any of the outright neocons at the beginning.
They had all denounced him and, you know, they all hated and feared that he wasn't Israel first enough and all this.
And so people put some hope in that and, nah, they're disappointed too.
So, you know, in the end, who stays good on all this stuff?
It's us.
You know, Scott, let me say a somewhat random thing but I – that is still relevant.
Sometimes you see people argue that – look, the president, don't worry about any of this.
He can do what he wants.
He can intervene where he wants.
He can send troops where he wants for 60 days because of the War Powers Resolution.
And then Congress can demand that something be done.
And so there were people like Newt Gingrich and others who are very much against the War Powers Resolution because they think it constrains the president.
And I just want to make sure people get this clear.
The War Powers Resolution is a terrible atrocity and it's not because it constrains the president.
It's because for the first time, there is express statutory authorization given to the president to intervene for any reason or no reason for up to 60 days.
Now, that was not understood to be one of his powers before.
So the idea, well, we're just going to limit him to 60 days.
OK, but he was actually limited to zero before.
So this is not a step forward.
Then he has 30 days to withdraw.
But the thing is once you commit American forces somewhere, you could get them in such a quagmire that it becomes strategically difficult to withdraw them.
And then the president can protest, look, if Congress is going to cut me off at the knees, they're going to undermine everything I'm doing.
So this thing actually – and then instead of really just fighting the president and saying, look, it's unconstitutional.
He does not have this power to do this.
They wind up in these fruitless lawsuits trying to challenge him over the War Powers Resolution.
It's actually been a net minus for us.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, of course, we get to the point where like today there's this article in or from yesterday at Lawfare Blog that's arguing the circular argument that, well, we have troops in Syria.
And so they're under threat of the Syrian government.
So anything that they do against the Syrian government there counts as self-defense, even though they're occupying eastern Syria against the wishes and without the invitation of the sovereign government of Syria.
Yeah.
In violation of the UN Charter that the USA concocted and foisted on this planet.
We can do what we want and you can do what we want.
Yeah.
And, of course, these are all – these are all actions that are somehow still being justified legally either under the argument that the president can do what he wants or that the authorization for the use of military force back in 15 – over 15 years ago is – 16 I guess now.
It still extends to this.
Now, that – certainly there is no precedent for that, that you would get some kind of a resolution that would then justify conflict after conflict after conflict in different countries under different circumstances for different reasons.
I mean that's not reasonable.
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Well, OK, so I guess we'll get back to the War Powers Act in a minute.
On the AUMF, let me ask you about that because there's a debate right now about passing a new AUMF that would actually codify a lot of what really is ad hoc.
A lot of what is actually not in the AUMF from 2001 that you talk about there, and particularly the term associated forces.
This is something that's just basically been made up.
So now AQAP in Yemen is associated forces.
And the Islamic State, which used to be part of al-Qaeda but broke off from al-Qaeda in 2013, well, yeah, that's associated forces, too.
And al-Shabaab, the local militia that George Bush created with his horrible policy in Somalia, well, I heard they took some Saudi money one time.
So, yeah, they're al-Qaeda, too.
And, you know, anybody's an associated force all the way down into Mali, Niger, Boko Haram in Nigeria.
And from there, you know, obviously the sky's the limit.
They can conquer whatever they want in the name of this thing.
But so I'm not really sure, you know, what the point is of passing this new thing when, you know, legitimizing this all and codifying it as official and using that term associated forces when they've been able to get away with just twisting it this whole time or, you know, what difference it really makes either way.
Yeah, I don't get what their motivations are behind it.
I mean, is it that they're leaving – they're open now to the fact that they're really lying and that the term associated forces isn't in the AUMF, that actually Tom Daschle took a lot of the worst of Dick Cheney's language out of that thing before they passed it and that they only wish it said all the things that it says.
So now they're trying to – although – but it's never served to limit them before.
So I don't know.
Right.
Yeah.
So it's very unclear what their motivations are.
I will note just on the basis of the history that fairly early on, like by the time we get to John Adams and the quasi-war with France, we already have cases where it's becoming established that there are two different kinds of wars.
There's a declared war and a lesser undeclared war.
So, for example, the quasi-war with France or the war against the Barbary pirates.
But in the case of these so-called undeclared wars, congressional statutes, numerous ones, were passed each time carefully directing exactly what was to happen.
And there's an interesting case under John Adams where there was a naval captain who had seized a ship coming from France.
And he was sued for damages over that.
And so the case wind up going to the Supreme Court.
And it turns out that Congress had only authorized ships to be seized that were going to France.
But the president said you can seize ships that are going to or from France.
Well, the court found that the captain was liable because the president does not trump Congress.
Congress didn't say you could seize ships coming from France.
So the president can't just say, well, I'm the president and I'm the commander-in-chief.
That's not legitimate.
Congress drives foreign policy.
And so, therefore, this captain was in the wrong.
Now, nobody knows cases like this, unfortunately.
What they have is the neocon version of history in which presidents have been doing whatever they want with basically no congressional oversight from the beginning.
And then you get these crazy statements from the State Department that over a hundred times or sometimes they'll even say hundreds of times the president has dispatched forces without getting congressional approval.
And then you look through it and say, well, what are these hundreds of times then?
What are they talking about?
We're talking about like right at the time of the Korean War when people were complaining that surely you can't send like a million Americans without getting some kind of authorization into this war.
And they say, oh, don't worry about it.
There's nothing unusual about it.
But it turns out these are all examples of like, you know, 10 Marines or like three army men chasing some cattle wrestlers across the Mexican border.
And they count that as an intervention, you know, that that's a use of presidential war powers.
You've got to be kidding me.
Those are the examples they find.
They come up with hundreds of those and they say that's why we can get involved in a war in Korea without consulting anybody.
Well, so what about Truman's argument that he didn't need Congress because he had the U.N. Security Council had authorized the war in Korea because the Soviets were boycotting at that point and didn't veto it?
Well, the U.N. Participation Act of 1945 actually has a clause saying and it's just from the beginning that the participation in war of any of the member countries, the decision about that will be left to their, quote, respective constitutional processes.
So that is to say the U.S. would still have its constitutional mode of getting congressional approval for intervention.
So even the U.N. documents and the document by which the United States acceded to the U.N. acknowledge that we retain the right to pursue our normal congressional process of declaring war even as a member of the U.N.
So that's just a complete BS argument.
Yeah.
All right.
Now, so back to the War Powers Act.
There's actually I mean, I guess I don't really get it.
Part of it says, and I guess I should have pulled up the language for this, but part of it says that the president only has the right to repel attack and he can do that for 60 days.
He doesn't have the right to start a war for 60 days.
But then I guess there's another part of it a few paragraphs later or something.
So explain this to me how this works.
I mean, basically what it boils down to is that the War Powers Resolution is completely schizophrenic, which is another reason that it's a problem because it means that we spend our time arguing both ways.
We say, well, I've got this paragraph in support of what I'm saying, and they say we've got this paragraph in support of what we're saying.
But if it really were a case of for purely defensive means, the president can call the armed forces into, you know, into action.
You didn't need the War Powers Resolution for that because the original constitutional understanding was that the president, you notice they use the word when they talk about Congress, they use the word declare, can declare war.
And that was a deliberate decision not to use the word make war because it was thought that in an emergency, a real, real emergency, the likes of which we've basically almost never experienced, the president, if he genuinely had no time to consult Congress, could make war.
So that's already existed.
But, of course, they know that none of the interventions they're talking about are emergencies where the president just doesn't have the time to consult anybody.
I mean, even they can't pull that one off.
And so they fall back on this kind of language.
But you're right.
The War Powers Resolution is schizophrenic, which is another reason it's a waste of our time.
Hey, does it mean anything in Article 2 where it says, well, the president shall be the commander in chief of the armed forces when called into the actual service of the United States?
Yes.
I mean, what that means is even Alexander Hamilton was good about this.
He says in Federalist 69 that the president will direct the military once hostilities have broken out and war has been declared.
But thankfully, our president will be much weaker than the British king, who also had the power to declare war.
So there it is.
He doesn't declare the war, but he can direct the war once declared.
All right.
So in the case of Syria here, we have basically a punitive strike based on what appears to be a hoax.
I don't know if that's definitive yet, but another one of these chemical weapons sort of pseudo-Caucasus bellies.
And they did the same thing a year ago.
And it's more or less what Obama was going to do in 2013, although he backed down from it, was just hit some sites rather than a real carpet bombing campaign against Damascus or the Syrian army.
So that's good, at least, right?
They haven't changed the policy back to violent regime change in Damascus.
But still, he did this strike.
And I guess it's the New York Times claiming that Mattis wanted to go to Congress, which sounds like he wanted to back down, not do it at all.
He wanted to go to Congress, but Trump overruled him.
But OK, so let's say that it wasn't a hoax.
And let's say for argument's sake, Tom, that we know that this evil genocidal dictator is using chemical weapons to murder civilians because of how fun he thinks it is.
And after World War II, we promise never again we have the responsibility to protect and intervene, even in a violent conflict that's taking place wholly within the borders of a single state.
We must intervene to protect civilians from these atrocities.
And if that means Donald Trump gets to fire some cruise missiles, what does the law say?
Well, I mean it doesn't – the law actually doesn't matter whether it was a hoax or whether – what the reason is that Trump wants to intervene.
The question about war powers is that the power rests with Congress and you do need to get congressional consent.
As Trump himself noted before he became president, I mean under the Obama years, he was saying, hey, you got to get congressional approval before you do some stupid military thing.
Now he neither wants the congressional approval nor does he want to call it stupid any longer.
But it doesn't matter.
The question of what the war powers of the president are has nothing to do with the merits of what he's doing.
The question is – because of course he'll always claim that the merits are very strong.
Of course that – we need to have – he says laughingly – He's not claiming a threat to the United States, right?
He's claiming that this is an atrocity and a quote-unquote civil war although we know it's really a lot more than that.
Right.
I mean on this, I would want to argue it less from the law than from the wisdom of it and whether we ought to do it.
What I really should ask about was the international law, right?
Because you talked about that UN participation act where the law says America is bound by that and that says that you're not allowed to start a war unless you can get the French and the Russians and the Chinese to agree to it on the UN Security Council.
Yeah, and then the Security Council refused to approve I guess Russia's complaint about the strikes even though it's probably complaining on precisely the grounds that you just did.
I mean I'm not one to – and this is a problem, right, when the United Nations system would hold the Americans back if they would obey its law.
I don't mean to invoke that as really the highest authority or anything like that.
Right.
It does seem meaningful though, right, when America has a gun to the head of the rest of the world all day long in the name of international law.
But then they can just make up and do whatever they want whenever they want.
Yeah, especially when they have so little credibility after time after time of – oh yeah, I know we screwed up that country and now millions of people are without homes.
But it's an honest mistake and then it happens again and again and again.
There are no – at this point I just think there are no honest mistakes with these people.
Yeah, well, got to get them helicopters sold.
Yeah, it's just nuts.
I mean is it really so bad to make an honest living?
Is that so unthinkable?
I don't know.
Yeah, well and of course you have – and this is something that's part of the free-for-all of the empire, right, is you have the interests of the foreign states.
And so many of the think tanks in Washington, D.C. now are – I mean so many of them already represented the Israelis mostly with American money I guess.
But so many of these now are directly bankrolled by the governments of the UAE, Saudi and Qatar.
And these are the people who are churning out all the studies about who's got to get bombed.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean of course the studies at these think tanks generally just buttress what the regime wants to do already.
Like there's no state department official.
Yeah, but which regime?
I mean that's the thing, right?
But there's no state department official that says, you know, I didn't want to intervene until I read what the Heritage Foundation wrote about whatever.
I mean they want to do it.
No, that's true.
It's all consensus building, right?
I mean this is why we see – But of course it leaves the impression that all the experts support this.
That's the thing is that it gets the general public on board because look at all these foreign policy specialists.
They all say we have to bomb.
Who am I to disagree?
Yeah.
Well, you're a decent person who knows a sociopathic liar when he sees one.
I'd say that's pretty good.
Yeah.
And a foreign bank rolled one at that.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's right.
All right.
Listen, man.
I love it when you come on the show.
We should do this more often.
Yeah, absolutely.
Thanks for having me.
Thanks very much, Tom.
All right, you guys.
That is the heroic Tom Woods, host of The Tom Woods Show.
Does interviews all week long.
His latest book is Real Dissent.
Before that, Roll Back, The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History, and Meltdown.
Man, this is just such a great telling of what happened with the last financial crisis in the fall of 2008 there.
The great book Meltdown.
Also, Nullification and a whole bunch more.
TomWoods.com.
Hey, I want to add on a special thanks to the heroic Ron Paul, the greatest American hero ever, in my estimation, for interviewing me on his show, The Liberty Report, with the great Dan McAdams as well.
It was really great.
They interviewed me on Monday, and it ran on today, Wednesday.
I don't know what day you guys are hearing this, but it ran on Wednesday.
You can find it on YouTube.com, and I'll blog it and all that.
We talked about Syria and Afghanistan and other things.
Libertarianism.
So thanks, Ron.
You're great.
