If Congress had debated recent wars, we'd have saved trillions: Walter Rodgers
(NEWSER) - Congressional Republicans have been hard at work cutting a few million in funding from NPR; but if they’d just played by the rules a decade ago, they could have saved at least $4 trillion, writes Walter Rodgers in the Christian Science Monitor . That's one estimate of how much the Iraq and Afghanistan wars have cost us, "wars that Congress putatively authorized but never formally declared." The Constitution's Article I, Section 8 makes it clear that only Congress “shall have the Power ... to declare war”—but over the past half-century, we’ve been sending our troops to battle with hardly a thought for the legislature, he writes. "And now it’s happening again, as the US began bombing Libya without a congressional declaration—or even a single hearing or debate." More»
