Powers of the Executive in Times of War

Executive in Time of War

The Constitution of the United States makes the president "Commander-in-Chief" of the armed forces, but does not give to this chief executive unlimited authority to declare war (Fisher 1990, 244). It is the purpose of this study to trace the doctrinal development of war powers held by the executive. Consequently, legislative war powers enactments, executive war powers initiatives, and judiciary war powers-related decisions and particularly those decisions of the United States Supreme Court will be examined. Given that the United States Supreme Court is the court of last resort, it is the decisions of this court that will be the central focus of this analysis.

The two central themes emerging from the study revolve around two questions. First, what is the proper allocation of war powers between the Congress and the president? Secondly, does Congress, in its role in appropriating funds for the maintenance of the armed forces have authority to place restrictions on the use of such forces or is the action an infringement of the war powers of the president as commander-in-chief? These issues are seen by any number of analysts as of significance in that they speak to the important question of whether the Founding Fathers intended for Congress or the president to have the authority to commence war (Adler 1988, 1).

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at all an assertion of judicial supremacy over the other branches of the federal government. The Court in Marbury pointedly refrained from asserting any general constitutional control of executive actions, asserting (but not actually exerting) authority over executive branch officials only in the most limited context of non-discretionary "ministerial" actions. Youngstown, in contrast, is a bold assertion of judicial power over the conduct of the President in matters concerning the scope of the President's constitutional authority. It is probably the Supreme Court's first genuine assertion and exercise of the Court's modern claim of constitutional interpretive supremacy over the actions of the President of the United States, in a case where such a claim really mattered. The claim of judicial supremacy was not made in express terms, as the Court would come to make it six years later, in Cooper v. Aaron, and repeatedly in cases in the five decades since Youngstown. Rather, the claim of supremacy in Youngstown was implicit in the Court's action: it upheld an injunction against the enforcement of the President's orders, nullifying a presidential executive order in time of war (Paulsen 2002, p. 217). Youngstown is seen by Paulsen (2
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 6519
Approximate Pages = 26 (250 words per page)