Damon Root puts it succinctly: The Iran War is unconstitutional.
President Donald Trump has launched a massive military attack on Iran without first obtaining a declaration of war from Congress. Do Trump's actions violate the terms of the U.S. Constitution?
In a word, yes. The president of the United States has no lawful authority to launch a war absent a congressional declaration of war.
To understand why this is so, consider the arguments of James Madison, who is sometimes called the "father of the Constitution" because of the important role that he played in the document's drafting and framing at the 1787 Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia. "The constitution supposes," Madison explained, "what the History of all [Governments] demonstrates, that the [Executive] is the branch of power most interested in war, & most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the [Legislature.]"
Boy, did Jimmy Madison call it, or what? Damon also cites St. George Tucker's 1803 book, View of the Constitution of the United States.
And nothing more recent than that.
I am in total sympathy.
But for more recent history, turn to another Jim: specifically, Geraghty, writing at the WaPo: Iran is the sound of another president becoming a hawk. (WaPo gifted link) Looking at the muscular actions of Clinton, Bush, Obama, Biden, and now Trump, his bottom line:
More likely, the last few presidents believed what they said on the campaign trail. After all, they didn’t think of themselves as raging warmongers like the guy they sought to replace. They genuinely believed that because they were reasonable, they surely could get enemies of the U.S. to see reason, too. And then they sat down behind the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office and gradually realized the world was a far more dangerous place than it appeared during those campaign rallies.
The public doesn’t know precisely what’s in the presidential daily brief; they’ve only been declassified up to Jan. 20, 1977. But we can take a good guess at the gist, which is that lots of bad people around the world are trying to harm Americans. Just about every day, some new threat, some new weapons system is being developed, some new extremist faction is convinced they can get what they want by blowing up an airliner or a U.S. Embassy or a car bomb in Times Square.
If you see that sort of intelligence every day … how dovish can you remain? Would you rather be the president accused of being a warmonger, or be remembered as the president who hesitated as the threat grew closer? This many consecutive presidents being more hawkish than they intended suggests it’s not just a pattern in the character of the men who get elected. It’s just the nature of a violent world where many malevolent men think the answer to their problems is to attack Americans.
I get that, too.
Also of note:
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You can't say you weren't warned. Noah Smith makes a bold claim: Superintelligence is already here, today.
Right now, today, AI can do mental tasks that no human can do. In a few minutes, it can read an entire scientific literature, and extract many of the basic conclusions and insights from that literature. No human can do that. A single human can be an expert in one or two complex subjects; an AI can be an expert in all of them at once. A human needs to eat and sleep and take breaks; an AI agent can work tirelessly at proving a theorem or writing code. And AI can prove theorems and write code — or write paragraphs of text — much, much faster than any human.
These are all superhuman cognitive capabilities. They go far, far beyond anything that even the smartest human being can do. They are the result of combining the roughly human-level language ability, pattern recognition, and conceptual analysis of an LLM with the pre-2022 superhuman memory, speed, and processing power.
I don’t want to get sidetracked here, but I think there’s a nonzero chance that AI never gets much better than humans at most of the things that humans were better than computers at in 2021. It seems possible that humans are simply incredibly specialized in a few types of cognitive tasks — extracting patterns from sparse data, synthesizing various patterns into “intuition” and “judgement”, and communicating those patterns in language — and that we’ve basically approached the theoretical maximum in those narrow areas.
Noah's post is quite long, and well-argued. Recommended to anyone interested in a minor topic like the future of humanity.
It's long been my hope (and also fear) that AI could be used to design and develop cheap, scalable artificial photosynthesis, allowing easy-peasy control of atmospheric CO2. Global warming solved! (But perhaps also introducing possible doomsday, so…)
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Deserves a look. I'm generally a knee-jerk opponent of tax-raising schemes, but Scott Hodge might win me over: Targeting this $2.8 trillion tax shelter could solve a big U.S. problem. (WaPo gifted link) What's he targeting?
The Congressional Budget Office’s latest economic report offers a bleak forecast of the U.S. government’s fiscal health. The study projects deficits surpassing $2 trillion for years to come, and the widening gap between federal spending and tax revenue means that the national debt will hit levels not seen even in wartime.
The menu of solutions to close this gap is just as depressing: slash benefits and services or raise taxes. But one option could generate substantial revenue while making the tax system fairer: ending the tax exemption for America’s massive nonprofit business sector.
Many “charities” have become big businesses. While numerous benevolent charities do wonderful work, the industry is dominated by some of the top companies in America operating largely free from the tax obligations that burden their for-profit competitors. The commercial revenue generated by these nonprofits totaled $2.8 trillion in 2023, nearly three times the amount nonprofits receive from donations and government grants.
Scott specifically mentions AARP. Yes! Go get 'em! (Why? See my 2023 rant: AARP Treats Me Like I Was Already Senile)
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