War Powers : : The Politics of Constitutional Authority / / Mariah Zeisberg.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter Princeton University Press eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2013
• VerfasserIn: Zeisberg, Mariah,
• Place / Publishing House: Princeton, NJ : : Princeton University Press, , [2013]; ©2013
• Year of Publication: 2013
• Edition: Core Textbook
• Language: English
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (288 p.)

Armed interventions in Libya, Haiti, Iraq, Vietnam, and Korea challenged the US president and Congress with a core question of constitutional interpretation: does the president, or Congress, have constitutional authority to take the country to war? War Powers argues that the Constitution doesn't offer a single legal answer to that question. But its structure and values indicate a vision of a well-functioning constitutional politics, one that enables the branches of government themselves to generate good answers to this question for the circumstances of their own times. Mariah Zeisberg shows that what matters is not that the branches enact the same constitutional settlement for all conditions, but instead how well they bring their distinctive governing capacities to bear on their interpretive work in context. Because the branches legitimately approach constitutional questions in different ways, interpretive conflicts between them can sometimes indicate a successful rather than deficient interpretive politics. Zeisberg argues for a set of distinctive constitutional standards for evaluating the branches and their relationship to one another, and she demonstrates how observers and officials can use those standards to evaluate the branches' constitutional politics. With cases ranging from the Mexican War and World War II to the Cold War, Cuban Missile Crisis, and Iran-Contra scandal, War Powers reinterprets central controversies of war powers scholarship and advances a new way of evaluating the constitutional behavior of officials outside of the judiciary.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Chapter 1. Who Has Authority to Take the Country to War? -- Chapter 2. Presidential Discretion and the Path to War -- Chapter 3. "Uniting Our Voice at the Water's Edge" -- Chapter 4. Defensive War -- Chapter 5. Legislative Investigations as War Power -- Chapter 6. The Politics of Constitutional Authority -- Acknowledgments -- Index