Powers of the President during crisesSmith, J. Malcolm (John Malcolm)
History
Powers of the President during crises
Smith, J. Malcolm (John Malcolm)
Constitutional history -- United States; Executive power -- United States
[3] Robert Connery, _The Navy and Industrial Mobilization in World War
II_ (Princeton University Press, 1951) p. 6.
[4] Exemplified by Justice Davis’s decision for the majority of the
Court in _Ex parte Milligan_, 4 Wall. 2, 120-21, 126 (1866):
“The Constitution of the United States is a law for rulers and
people, equally in war and in peace, and covers with the shield
of its protection all classes of men, at all times, and under all
circumstances. No doctrine, involving more pernicious consequences was
ever invented by the wit of man than that any of its provisions can
be suspended during any of the great exigencies of government. Such
a doctrine leads directly to anarchy or despotism; but the theory of
necessity on which it is based is false; for the government, within the
constitution, has all the powers granted to it, which are necessary to
preserve its existence....
“... It could well be said that a country, preserved at the sacrifice
of all the cardinal principles of liberty, is not worth the cost of
preservation.”
[5] Justice Sutherland for the Court in the 1936 case of _United States
v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corporation_, 299 U. S. 304, 316-18:
“And since the states severally never possessed international powers,
such powers could not have been carved from the mass of state powers
but obviously were transmitted to the United States from some other
source....
“It results that the investment of the federal government with the
powers of external sovereignty did not depend upon the affirmative
grants of the Constitution. The powers to declare and wage war, to
conclude peace, to make treaties, to maintain diplomatic relations
with other sovereignties, if they had never been mentioned in the
Constitution, would have been vested in the federal government as
necessary concomitants of nationality.”
[6] Justice Jackson, dissenting in the Japanese relocation case,
_Korematsu_ v. _United States_, 323 U. S. 214, 248 (1944) admonished
the Court as follows:
“But I would not lead people to rely on this Court for a review that
seems to me wholly delusive. The military reasonableness of these
orders can only be determined by the military superiors. If the people
ever let command of the war power fall in irresponsible hands, the
courts wield no power equal to its restraint. The chief restraint upon
those who command the physical forces of the country in the future, as
in the past, must be their responsibilities to the political judgments
of their contemporaries and to the moral judgments of history.”
[7] The words are, of course, those of John Locke, _Of Civil
Government_, Bk. II, Ch. XIV.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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