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Congress and war powers

Last week I reread the famous Youngstown Sheet and Tube v. Sawyer case to ascertain what relevance it had, if any, to current policy disputes over Iraq.

David B. Rivkin Jr. and Lee A. Casey, ("Presidential prerogatives," Op-Ed, Friday) do not, I believe, note the most relevant portion of Justice Robert H. Jackson's famous concurring opinion, which is worth quoting in its entirety:

"While Congress cannot deprive the president of the command of the Army and Navy, only Congress can provide him with an Army and Navy to command. It is also empowered to make rules for the government and regulation of land and naval forces. By which it may, to some unknown extent, impinge upon even command functions." (343 US 579, 644)

The court's opinion written by Justice Hugo Black does not seem to disagree with Justice Jackson's opinion. Its final paragraph begins as follows: "The founders of this nation entrusted law making powers to the Congress alone in both good times and bad times." (343 US 579, 589)

The wisdom of various Democratic proposals regarding our occupation-cum-war in Iraq will be for voters to judge in 2008. I think there can be little doubt as to their constitutionality.

In passing I would add that reconstructions do not always fulfill the hopes of a war's victor. In our own Civil War, while the Union won, it did not achieve its goals in the reconstruction of the former Confederate states. President Rutherford B. Hayes conceded this when he withdrew Federal troops from those states shortly after he took office in 1877. Moreover, the armed forces of the United States do not exist to police foreign civil wars. That most interventionist of presidents, Franklin D. Roosevelt, declined to bring our nation into the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s.

SEYMOUR KLEIMAN

Baltimore