Ann Coulter: Hey, Commander! Start Commanding!

Ann Coulter
Feb. 07, 2019

It's great that members of Congress have located specific legislative language permitting the president to build a border wall, but I'm wondering: Has anybody read the Constitution?

It says:

"The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States."

"(The president) shall take Care that the Laws be faithfully executed."

With millions of foreigners illegally pouring across our border, it sure looks like the laws are not being "faithfully executed." I wonder if the COMMANDER IN CHIEF has any authority to stop it.

The Constitution was expressly designed to make it difficult to do what our military does all the time -- fight wars around the globe -- and easy to do what our military never does -- defend our own country.

Congress was given power to "declare war," but not to "make war," for the precise purpose of stalling the march to war. It was a selling point that the legislative branch takes forever to do anything.

But we had a country to protect, so the Constitution gave the energetic, fast-moving president the authority to deploy the military defensively.

As Duke University constitutional law professor H. Jefferson Powell put it in his 2002 book, The President's Authority over Foreign Affairs: "(T)he president has a constitutional responsibility, independent of any act of Congress ... to preserve the physical safety ... of the United States against foreign threat."

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