I continue to be utterly mystified.

[PatrickforO]

336. This is part of a bigger issue, that of the US Congress, particularly

the Senate, abrogating their war powers in favor of the executive branch.

Maddow wrote a book called Drift about this very thing, and she's right. Our founders deliberately put war powers with the Congress because they knew then that any war would require serious debate. They didn't want a president just to be able to say 'go' and have it happen.

But that's what we got. And this war powers act that Clinton voted on authorizing Bush to pull the trigger (literally and figuratively) on invading Iraq was a part of that. The problem is that those in the US Senate with the exception of 21 Dems were too cowardly at that time to have the debate and just voted to allow Bush/Cheney and the neocons to start a war.

Now, Clinton was the Senator for NY at the time, and Wall Street feels war is good business - certainly the forever war has made Halliburton, Cheney's old company MASSIVE profits. Nonetheless, it was poor judgement as Manny says 'on an epic scale' for any Dem who voted to give Bush that power.

As many people on here are saying, this is a vote you've got to get right the first time because people's lives depend on it.