12/13/06 – Rep. Ron Paul – The Scott Horton Show

For Antiwar.com and Chaos Radio in Austin, Texas, I'm Scott Horton, and this is Antiwar Radio.
The Baker Commission has released their report providing a fig leaf for American withdrawal from Iraq.
So far, all indications are that the President means to stay the course.
Who decides?
To help us answer that question today, Dr. Ron Paul, who represents District 14 in South Texas.
Up there on Capitol Hill, they call him Dr. No.
Welcome to the show, Dr. Paul.
Thank you, Scott.
Good to be with you.
Good to talk to you again, sir.
And yesterday on Antiwar.com, your article was the spotlight article called Who Makes Foreign Policy?
And I believe your point was there, sir, that the Constitution grants all legislative powers to the Congress, and that the President's job is only carrying out what you tell him to do.
Is that right?
That's basically the theme of the article I wrote.
We have to start with pointing out, though, that the words foreign policy don't exist in the Constitution.
So this whole idea that people say, oh, the Constitution gives the power of the President to run and do whatever he wants in foreign policy.
And, of course, the President and this President isn't the first one to do it.
They all assume that they have this tremendous power.
But if you read the Constitution carefully, you know, it's up to the Congress to declare war, to ratify ambassadors and treaties, and, you know, so much.
We're responsible for raising an army and dictating to the President, he is the Commander-in-Chief, if we decide there is a war to be fought, then he can maneuver and command the troops.
But that's all that meant.
But to say that he has full control over foreign policy is completely wrong.
Well, now, in the actual text of Article II, there are only two powers related to the President that have to do with foreign affairs at all, and that's the power to negotiate treaties which don't have effect unless the Senate ratifies it by supermajority, and he has the power, as you say, to execute the war once Congress has decided to have one.
Right?
Right.
That's it.
Is there anything else in Article II about his foreign policy powers that I'm missing?
Not that I know of.
If somebody else can dig them up, they can tell us.
But, no, he has essentially very limited powers, and the Founders were intent on making the President a weak President.
And, of course, systematically, even from the very beginning of our country, there were always those who wanted to increase the power of the President.
You know, the Hamiltonians originally, you know, very early wanted to do that.
I think that side is winning the power the executive branch has continued to grow.
You know, to me, the most disturbing thing is not so much that the Presidents have yielded to the temptation of using and wanting more power.
It's the unbelievable willingness of Congress to give up their prerogative, their responsibilities.
It just seems like they go out of their way to diminish their importance.
Well, and that is sort of a common symptom of empires, right?
As more power gets centered in the executive branch, the Congressmen know that really their power comes from being close to the President, rather than standing their own ground against him.
Yes, and that was really the basic problem that's happened to the Republicans in these past six years, and why the Congress got wiped out, is they didn't stand on their own two feet, and they believed everything came from the President.
The President was powerful and got all the attention, it was all over, and if you didn't support him on the issue of war or all these great draconian pieces of legislation passed after 9-11, that they would be hurt in the polls.
But, lo and behold, by them pandering to the President and supporting him on everything, they themselves lost out, as well as the President.
I mean, the President couldn't be re-elected today, he sort of snuck in his second term, but long term it doesn't work on the short run.
It seems to help by pandering and following the party line, but I think the American people eventually want somebody to stand up and believe in something and fight for those beliefs.
Now, back to that Commander in Chief clause, quickly, where it says that the President shall be the Commander in Chief when called into the actual service of the United States.
According to Justice Department legal theorist John Yoo, or I guess former Justice Department legal theorist John Yoo, that means that the President can do just about anything, as far as I know, probably up to and including abolishing Congress, because he's the Commander in Chief.
Is that not correct?
His interpretation is so broad and so scary that the Commander in Chief could do just anything by executive order.
And, of course, when he set up these prisons and started torturing people and carrying out all this surveillance on private American citizens, you know, fortunately the Court said, hey, you guys, he's gone too far.
The Commander in Chief's title does not give him this power.
And the courts rule reasonably well, and so what happens?
The President comes back to Congress and the Congress is like puppy dogs.
They concede to the President everything that he's been doing and actually exempts the people in the executive branch from breaking any previous laws and that they can't be taken, and in the bill, on the Military Commission's bill, they've actually said that this law can't be reviewed in the federal courts.
That's yet to be tested, but no, that's a very, very dangerous interpretation.
I mean, every day it seems like we get closer and closer to, you know, a dictatorship.
But I always remain hopeful that the American people will wake up and finally put their foot down and say enough is enough.
Do you have much hope that the new Democrat majority will repeal the Military Commission's Act recently passed by the Republicans?
No, not a whole lot.
You'd think they would do something to curtail the war, but it looks like they've already said that they would vote for $160 billion in additional funding, so no, I'm not too optimistic.
Well, I hate to say this, but it is the typical argument, and I'm sure you have an answer for it.
Everything changed on September 11th.
Dr. Paul, this is not the era, you know, in the 1900s when our oceans protected us, and now the terrorists can come and get us, and our President needs this kind of power to keep us safe.
Yeah, and the American people unfortunately bought into this, and they believe that they can't be safe without giving up some of their freedoms and depending on the federal government.
I've come to the opposite conclusion.
The more freedoms you give up and the more power you give the President on the less free we are.
I mean, even 9-11, you can argue from a freedom point of view that 9-11 might not have happened if the airlines had been responsible for their property and their passengers and had guns on the airplane and really ran security like an armored car division might run their security.
So I would say that the American people are naive in the believing that they're going to be a lot safer by giving up more of their liberties.
That's like saying, uh-huh, what we need to do now is totally get rid of our Second Amendment, and we're all going to be safer.
But giving up our privacy, you know, all the things that we do on airlines and how the government now monitors everything that we do financially, medically, and on the Internet, all affects law-abiding American citizens.
You know, if you're having to be a terrorist, it wouldn't take you very long to work around these restraints.
We punish the American people.
That's the old saying that the conservatives have always said that, you know, if you have gun registration and restrictions on gun ownership, you take the guns from the law-abiding citizens and you give them to the criminals who will always have them.
And I think this is true on all this type of invasion of our privacy and this effort by the federal government to make us safe.
So it's the loss of faith that the people have both in the free market economy as well as taking care of themselves and that they become dependent on the federal government.
And then your argument is that that leads to even less security in the end.
That's right.
You end up with less freedom and less security, and I think that's where we are today, because although there haven't been any attacks on us by terrorists domestically, every day we have attacks on our people because we're in their backyard.
Why should they worry about coming over here where they can undermine us, you know, here in Iraq and Afghanistan?
They're delighted to have us over there and bleed us.
I don't think the Iranians could get a better deal with what they've done where they have us over there.
They're not directly involved, indirectly probably, but the Al Qaeda, the different groups who would like to bleed us are delighted with us being there and weakening us and, of course, making us financially in much worse shape.
Well, clearly you didn't support the invasion and don't support the occupation of Iraq.
What would be the proper way for a president to handle September 11th in a libertarian, Jeffersonian fashion rather than a George Bush one?
Well, you know, it's always tough to solve a problem that was created by conditions that we would have never endorsed.
But once it's happened, then you say, well, can you do nothing?
Almost, almost you could.
I had no objection to go after the head of Al Qaeda once it was decided that the Al Qaeda was responsible for the attack, to take out the head guy and go after Osama bin Laden.
Not to invade and occupy a country and take over Afghanistan and going into Iraq was completely foolish and had nothing to do with it, but to target one individual.
I even suggested, why don't we look at the letter of mark and reprisal and give a small group of people the authority to go and do that.
Well, and for people who don't understand, what exactly is a letter of mark and reprisal?
Well, in the original day, and I think Jefferson used this a good bit, and they used this against pirates, that instead of having a strong navy and going out and making attacks and settling these disputes when these ships were being attacked on the high seas, the Congress could write a letter of mark and reprisal and give a certain group or a ship or an individual authority in the name of our government to go and attack and destroy certain individuals.
So it was very limited.
It wasn't presidential.
It was by Congress.
And they saw this as a way of taking care of an enemy without having to declare war.
And this to me seemed like an opportunity for that because this was a stateless attack on us.
We can't declare war against Afghanistan.
I mean, Pakistan was as friendly to the Taliban and to Osama bin Laden.
They're probably still harboring him, but we didn't declare war against Pakistan, and we shouldn't have occupied Afghanistan.
So it would be a limited answer.
But there's a lot of other things that we could do.
I think about, I was drafted into the military during the Cuban crisis, and everybody said that it was a total victory for us because we stood tough.
And I think we did, and it was probably quite proper, nuclear missiles pointed at us from Havana.
But the one thing that Kennedy did was he went and talked to the Soviets behind the scene and said, What do you want?
And they said, We want those missiles out of Turkey.
And the American people would have been furious at that time if that had known that Kennedy agreed.
You said, All right, you know, you take your missiles out, and we'll take ours out of Turkey.
So in one way, why couldn't we have talked to these guys?
What's your big beef?
Well, our biggest beef is that you have military bases on our holy land in Saudi Arabia.
Fine, that doesn't sound like a wise thing to do.
We're coming home.
And just agreed to it and get out of there.
Instead, we did the opposite, even though we did close the base down in Saudi Arabia, we decided to build an embassy that's going to cost us a billion dollars in Baghdad and 14 more major bases right in their holy land, in their base.
And Iraq is considered Arab holy land, Muslim holy land as well.
So we should have changed our policy and told them what we were going to do, come home.
And also, at the same time, you could have in a very limited way gone after Osama bin Laden.
Possibly, Tora Bora would have come out differently instead of walking away from that and going into Iraq.
Maybe that would have ended that, and then it would have been a good excuse to say, hey, look, we took care of everybody who attacked us, and now we're going to have a different foreign policy.
Well, now, if we had declared an actual war, because you said the letter of Mark in reprisal was an alternative to declaring war in the Constitution, but of course what Congress decided to do in the case of Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, is to pass an authorization for the President to do what he wants.
Right, and that is where the real problem comes.
On the resolution giving the President power to go into Iraq, Congress was stuck in their responsibility, but they gave two reasons for it, that Saddam Hussein was a threat to our national security, which was an absolute joke, a misinformation, and possibly a lie.
And the other one was to enforce U.N. resolutions, because they claim Saddam Hussein wasn't following the U.N. resolutions.
Of course, there's been other countries that have not followed, but nothing seems to happen.
But the irony there was that we were unilaterally enforcing a U.N. resolution against Saddam Hussein, and when the U.N. was asked about supporting this enforcement, they said no, and they wouldn't do it.
So here we are using an international body to enforce one of their laws that they themselves didn't care whether it was enforced or not.
So it doesn't make a lot of sense.
Well, and you said before the war that this is what Osama bin Laden wants.
That was part of your reasoning for opposing it back in 2002, is that not right?
Yes, we couldn't have done him a bigger favor.
I think the success of the planes was far beyond what they expected.
And then our response was more than they expected.
They probably figured we'd do like Clinton did, bomb a few places.
But the fact that we literally took over two countries just fell into their lap.
Now their recruitment is way up, and we're doing what the Soviets did and what finally bankrupted the Soviet Union.
And they well bankrupt us, because right now I don't see an end coming to this.
Ironically, it's more likely we're going to send more troops than less troops even after the Iraqi study group's report.
Dr. Ron Paul, thank you very much for your time today, sir.
Thank you.
It was great talking to you.
All right, take care.