In cutting out Congress, Obama has overstepped even the dubious precedent set when President Bill Clinton bombed Kosovo in 1999. Then, the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel asserted that Congress had given its consent by appropriating funds for the Kosovo campaign. It was a big stretch, given the actual facts — but Obama can’t even take advantage of this same desperate expedient, since Congress has appropriated no funds for the Libyan war. The president is simply using money appropriated to the Pentagon for general purposes to conduct the current air campaign. ~Bruce Ackerman

Ackerman’s article is well worth reading, and it’s a valuable corrective to the usual nonsense being offered by Casey and Rivkin this week. Casey and Rivkin have never seen an executive action for which they could not invent some contorted, twisted legal defense. Their latest offering is remarkably weak even by their standards. Yes, they do their usual song and dance that whatever it is that Obama has done is grounded in “the Constitution’s text and history,” but they cannot actually explain why that is the case. Essentially, they say that military action is permissible because of U.N. authorization and because the Libyan government committed hostile acts against the U.S. decades ago. Seriously, this is the best the apologists for the imperial Presidency can do?

During the Bush years, Casey and Rivkin could always be counted on to discover that whatever the President had done it was completely consistent with the Constitution and legal precedent, because apparently they cannot imagine that there is anything pertaining to national security or war that the President as Commander-in-Chief is not allowed to do. Is indefinite detention without trial permissible? Of course. Warrantless wiretapping? Naturally. Torturing detainees? No problem. To cite Casey and Rivkin as reliable authorities on interpreting the extent of executive power is a joke, but for some reason this is what Jacob Heilbrunn does today.

Obama’s decision to attack Libya is outrageous for many reasons, but one of these is that it reflects Obama’s apparent belief in sweeping inherent executive powers to start and prosecute wars arbitrarily. As Ackerman writes later:

The president’s insistence that his Libyan campaign is limited in its purposes and duration is no excuse. These are precisely the issues that he should have defined in collaboration with Congress. Now that he claims inherent power, why can’t he redefine U.S. objectives on his own? No less important, what is to stop some future president from using Obama’s precedent to justify even more aggressively unilateral actions?