Conflict Powers: The Politics of Constitutional Authority

Armed interventions in Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea challenged the US president and Congress with a core query of constitutional interpretation: does the president, or Congress, have constitutional authority to take the nation to struggle? Conflict Powers argues that the Structure would not supply a single authorized reply to that query. However its construction and values point out a imaginative and prescient of a well-functioning constitutional politics, one that allows the branches of presidency themselves to generate good solutions to this query for the circumstances of their very own occasions.

Mariah Zeisberg reveals that what issues just isn’t that the branches enact the identical constitutional settlement for all circumstances, however as a substitute how effectively they carry their distinctive governing capacities to bear on their interpretive work in context. As a result of the branches legitimately method constitutional questions in several methods, interpretive conflicts between them can generally point out a profitable somewhat than poor interpretive politics. Zeisberg argues for a set of distinctive constitutional requirements for evaluating the branches and their relationship to 1 one other, and he or she demonstrates how observers and officers can use these requirements to judge the branches’ constitutional politics. With circumstances starting from the Mexican Conflict and World Conflict II to the Chilly Conflict, Cuban Missile Disaster, and Iran-Contra scandal, Conflict Powers reinterprets central controversies of struggle powers scholarship and advances a brand new manner of evaluating the constitutional habits of officers outdoors of the judiciary.