This is the fourth of five posts about my new book, Historical Gloss and Foreign Affairs: Constitutional Authority in Practice. In the last post, I discussed the termination of U.S. treaties and executive agreements. In this post, I consider the distribution of authority between Congress and the President with respect to the use of military force.
The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war, but many military conflicts do not involve formal declarations of war, and that was true even at the Founding. And the Constitution makes the President the Commander in Chief without defining the nature or scope of that role.
