Nov 2023 Mod notice:
There may be other, more specific, threads about some aspects of US politics, but this one tends to act as a hub for all sorts of related news and information, so it's usually one of the busiest OTC threads.
If you're new to OTC, it's worth reading the Introduction to On-Topic Conversations
and the On-Topic Conversations debate guidelines
before posting here.
Rumor-based, fear-mongering and/or inflammatory statements that damage the quality of the thread will be thumped. Off-topic posts will also be thumped. Repeat offenders may be suspended.
If time spent moderating this thread remains a distraction from moderation of the wiki itself, the thread will need to be locked. We want to avoid that, so please follow the forum rules
when posting here.
In line with the general forum rules, 'gravedancing' is prohibited here. If you're celebrating someone's death or hoping that they die, your post will get thumped. This rule applies regardless of what the person you're discussing has said or done.
Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Yes. It was an authorised military intervention, but not a declared war. Declarations of war are terribly complicated, so people look for ways around it.
To give an example from our side, we deployed troops as a part of a coalition as per international assistance treaties. But since we haven't declared a state of war, we're not in a war.
Counter-intuitive, but there you go.
Edited by TerminusEst on Jan 5th 2019 at 11:53:39 AM
Si Vis Pacem, Para PerkeleIf you could show me the legal document that defines 'State of War' as a war having been declared by Congress, and the one showing that the emergency powers of the president being contingent on said formal declaration of war, I would be reassured. Do they exist? Congress Resolution? Supreme Court Decision? Anything.
Edited by Oruka on Jan 5th 2019 at 12:07:46 PM
I'll leave that to those who know the legalese of the US better than I do, but that's how it functions in accordance to international law (i.e. various treaties and commitments). But I can tell you, you're not in a formal war.
I'm Finnish, we just get involved everywhere we reasonably can.
Edited by TerminusEst on Jan 5th 2019 at 11:58:44 AM
Si Vis Pacem, Para PerkeleYou're a lucky man, Terminus. Finland is nice. When I asked for docs, I didn't mean specifically you, though.
I just want to be sure what the Orange Testicle can do. The difference between him and Obama is, among others, that Obama was sane, and not surrounded by sycophantic, malicious cowards.
Also Obama never joked about killing his critics.
Edited by Oruka on Jan 5th 2019 at 12:10:00 PM
Straight from Wikipedia:
In a time of declared war, the president has certain additional powers available to him. These stem from the idea that the constitution directs the president to use any and all resources possible to win a war, and to that end he’s allowed to do things like put the transportation industry under federal control or commandeer shipping.
We are not at war, and even if we got tangled up in something with Iran or somebody we probably wouldn’t get a proper war declared, so it’s unlikely Trump would be able to use any of the president’s wartime powers.
If you’re wondering about the national emergency thing we were discussing earlier I’d suggest going back and reading the conversation. There are powers the president could theoretically call upon at any time, but the legal and practical barriers are high at this time.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 5th 2019 at 12:15:26 PM
They should have sent a poet.The Federalist Society is a goddamn abomination. They give an educated patina of respectability to vicious hard-right conservative policies. They promote chapters at law schools that start the pipeline of new Brett Kavanaughs and Amy Coney Barretts.
They are a fucking disgrace and I’m deeply angry that there’s an active chapter at my law school, who got student organization of the year a couple years ago in spite of protests that they do no actual community service, National does a lot of the leg work, and they promote heinous views.
They had a speaker talking about 3d guns a couple years ago. His client was that asshole who fled the country after sexual assault charges in 2018. They are incredibly well funded and influential and I hate them with every fiber of my being.
Edited by wisewillow on Jan 5th 2019 at 3:19:36 PM
"War is a state of armed conflict between states, governments, societies and informal paramilitary groups, such as mercenaries, insurgentsand militias. It is generally characterized by extreme violence, aggression, destruction, and mortality, using regular or irregular military forces. Warfare refers to the common activities and characteristics of types of war, or of wars in general.[1] Total war is warfare that is not restricted to purely legitimate military targets, and can result in massive civilian or other non-combatant suffering and casualties."
"War must entail some degree of confrontation using weapons and other military technology and equipment by armed forces employing military tactics and operational art within a broad military strategy subject to military logistics. Studies of war by military theorists throughout military history have sought to identify the philosophy of war, and to reduce it to a military science. Modern military science considers several factors before a national defence policy is created to allow a war to commence: the environment in the area(s) of combat operations, the posture national forces will adopt on the commencement of a war, and the type of warfare troops will be engaged in."
Among the types of war listed are:
- Asymmetric warfare is a conflict between belligerents of drastically different levels of military capability and/or size.
- Civil war is a war between forces belonging to the same nation or political entity.
- Insurgency is a rebellion against authority, when those taking part in the rebellion are not recognized as belligerents (lawful combatants). An insurgency can be fought via counter-insurgency warfare, and may also be opposed by measures to protect the population, and by political and economic actions of various kinds aimed at undermining the insurgents' claims against the incumbent regime.
- Unconventional warfare, the opposite of conventional warfare, is an attempt to achieve military victory through acquiescence, capitulation, or clandestine support for one side of an existing conflict.
It's all war, whether you declare it or not. It's not from the media, it's scholars and professionals as well. Calling what the US is doing 'not-War' is disingenuous.
I followed the conversation earlier and wasn't convinced by the conclusion summarized here. Hence why I'm asking about specific law, antecedent, and wording. Maybe I've been watching too much Legal Eagle. That guy's been pretty good about making US Law procedure interesting and comprehensible in all its messy nuances. The following video goes into a lot of detail about Presidential Self-Pardon.
The OT sure does test the system, doesn't he? If something is a norm rather than a law, he'll flaunt it, so it's crucial to know which is which.
Edited by Oruka on Jan 5th 2019 at 1:52:16 AM
From the New York Times:
While it is hard to know exactly what the president has in mind, or whether he has any conception about what it would entail, one thing is clear: Not only would such an action be illegal, but if members of the armed forces obeyed his command, they would be committing a federal crime.
Begin with the basics. From the founding onward, the American constitutional tradition has profoundly opposed the president’s use of the military to enforce domestic law. A key provision, rooted in an 1878 statute and added to the law in 1956, declares that whoever “willfully uses any part of the Army or the Air Force” to execute a law domestically “shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than two years” — except when “expressly authorized by the Constitution or Act of Congress.”
Another provision, grounded in a statute from 1807 and added to the law in 1981, requires the secretary of defense to “ensure that any activity (including the provision of any equipment or facility or the assignment or detail of any personnel)” must “not include or permit direct participation by a member of the Army, Navy, Air Force, or Marine Corps in a search, seizure, arrest, or other similar activity unless participation in such activity by such member is otherwise authorized by law.”
In response to the Hurricane Katrina disaster in New Orleans, Congress created an express exception to the rules, and authorized the military to play a backup role in “major public emergencies.” But in 2008 Congress and President Bush repealed this sweeping exception. Is President Trump aware of this express repudiation of the power which he is threatening to invoke?
The statute books do contain a series of carefully crafted exceptions to the general rule. Most relevantly, Congress has granted the Coast Guard broad powers to enforce the law within the domestic waters of the United States. But there is no similar provision granting the other military services a comparable power to “search, seize and arrest” along the Mexican border. Given Congress’s decision of 2008, this silence speaks louder than words. Similarly, the current military appropriations bill fails to exempt military professionals from criminal punishment for violating the law in their use of available funds.
It is, I suppose, possible to imagine a situation in which the president might take advantage of the most recent exception, enacted in 2011, which authorized the military detention of suspected terrorists associated with Al Qaeda or the Taliban. But despite President Trump’s unsupported claims about “terrorists” trying to cross the border, it is an unconscionable stretch to use this proviso to support using the military for operations against the desperate refugees from Central America seeking asylum in our country.
It is even less plausible for the president to suspend these restrictions under the National Emergencies Act of 1976. From the Great Depression through the Cold War, presidents systematically abused emergency powers granted them by Congress in some 470 statutes, culminating in the Watergate fiasco. In response, the first section of the 1976 act terminated all existing emergencies and created a framework of checks and balances on the president’s arbitrary will.
If President Trump declared an emergency, Section Five of the act gives the House of Representatives the right to repudiate it immediately, then pass their resolution to the Senate — which is explicitly required to conduct a floor vote within 15 days. Since President Trump’s “emergency” declaration would be a direct response to his failure to convince Congress that national security requires his wall, it is hard to believe that a majority of the Senate, if forced to vote, would accept his show of contempt for their authority.
Edited by megaeliz on Jan 5th 2019 at 5:27:51 AM
This is only true for the popular definition of the word war, not the legal one. And here, the legal definition is the only one that matters. Legally speaking, we are not at war, no matter what conflicts we’re actually engaged in.
Historically this has been a point of some contention, lots of people have argued we should be at war legally to do what we’ve been doing.
Edited by archonspeaks on Jan 5th 2019 at 3:36:42 AM
They should have sent a poet.Yeah, the legal definition of war is, basically, sustained armed conflict directly between the militaries of two nation-states. This kind of conflict doesn't really happen much these days, if it all. Wars tend to be either civil wars, against insurgents, that sort of thing.
You can't be at war with terrorists, because terrorists aren't a nation-state. An armed conflict against one plays by a very different rulebook than one fought against a country.
Leviticus 19:34"Historically this has been a point of some contention, lots of people have argued we should be at war legally to do what we’ve been doing."
Fair enough.
![]()
![]()
At this point I'm only asking out of academic curiosity: was the Viet-Cong considered a country during the war? Is (Was?) ISIS a Nation-State? Or are those a matter of recognition as well as on-the-ground territorial control?
(Was the Confederation recognized as a separate country by the Union, and, if not, who did they declare war to, legally?)
The questions that actually still worry me are, can the President be indicted, can the President pardon himself, will Nancy Pelosi persist in refusing to impeach him, could the Democrats do it if they wanted to, and, in the meantime, what can they do from Congress given his veto power?
As long as Fox News backs him, he's solid. Their propaganda machine systematically protects him, unconditionally, and with scientific psychological precision. Vox did a nice breakdown:
"So what?" indeed. It's cultish.
Edited by Oruka on Jan 5th 2019 at 4:04:04 AM

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Declaration_of_war_by_the_United_States
Tldr, Congress declares war, not just okays it by funding it. And we haven't done that since WWII.
Found a Youtube Channel with political stances you want to share? Hop on over to this page and add them.