Posted by Sir Four at 1:25pm Feb 15 '07I saw this on Andrew Sullivan's blog. After reading it, one person wrote in:
Anyway, here's the quote. This is Lincoln responding to his law partner, who was advocating the president's right to go to war without Congressional authorization:
Too bad we don't have great men such as Lincoln around anymore.
"You may not believe this, but your quote from Lincoln moved me (completely unexpected, sitting at my desk during a normal workday) close to tears. Writing 150 years ago, Lincoln hit upon the primal cause of the whole sorry tragedy of our past four years: we turned our president into a king, and we allowed him to act as kings do, waging useless wars with our children and our treasure for their own self-aggrandizement."
Anyway, here's the quote. This is Lincoln responding to his law partner, who was advocating the president's right to go to war without Congressional authorization:
"Allow the President to invade a neighboring nation whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose, and you allow him to make war at pleasure. Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after having given him so much as you propose. If to-day he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, 'I see no probability of the British invading us;' but he will say to you, 'Be silent: I see it, if you don't.'
"The provision of the Constitution giving the war making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our President where kings have always stood."
Too bad we don't have great men such as Lincoln around anymore.