By Kary Love
I almost never agree with Mr. Trump. However, having wasted a life as a lawyer trying to resurrect the Constitution of “limited, specifically enumerated powers” and checks and balances to avoid tyranny, I found myself reading his February 19, 2025, executive order proclaiming that, “ending Federal overreach and restoring the constitutional separation of powers is a priority of my Administration,” with hope and amazement.
The order directs all federal agencies in coordination with the DOGE teams embedded within them to spend the next 60 days combing through their regulations to identify any that may be unconstitutional.
Sadly, the most critical overreach destroying separation of powers was not mentioned. Let me explain.
The authors of the Constitution had lived under the government of England where the King was not only commander in chief of the Armies of the Empire, but could declare war as well. History, a favorite subject of the authors of the Constitution, was studied to see where England and other nations went off the rails and degenerated from legitimate government into tyranny and they found a single error repeated over and over again. What was it?
When one person could declare a war and then become Commander of the Armies to fight the war, in every case that person often declared a war not because the nation was actually threatened, but because taxes and regulations had become so irritating to the people that they were getting restless and demanding reform and possibly revolution. So the Big Head Man, King, Emperor, Chief, whatever, would drum up a boogie man foreign enemy, use fear to inflame the people and divert their attention from the domestic over taxation and government abuse, and use war to manipulate patriotism to stay in power. This trick had been used over and over in history across the world.
So the Constitution created separation of powers especially in matters of war. The Congress alone can declare war: see: Article I, section 8, clause 11. The authors debated this and concluded history made the people safer if their representatives had to reach a consensus decision that war was necessary and proper. This, it was argued, prevented plunging the nation into an unnecessary war started by some single madman, or a wannabe King, or tyrant seeking to use war to benefit his own power grab as had occurred so many times in history.
Okay, you don’t trust me on this, I understand, because you have grown up in an America where Congress had long ago abandoned its duty to be the sole entity to declare war and instead delegated it to our Nuclear Dictator. Perhaps then you will listen to Abe Lincoln in 1848, responding to a challenger claiming the President could declare war without Congress, on the matter:
“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons. Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This, our Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all Kingly oppressions; and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us. But your view destroys the whole matter, and places our president where kings have always stood.” (–Abraham Lincoln, 1848)
Fear of the USSR (remember them?) overwhelmed Americans and enabled the Congress to give the President the power to declare nuclear war in the 1947 National Security Act. Just one dude, with his “nuclear football,” can launch the entire US nuclear arsenal! Enough bombs to pretty much wipe out humankind, launched in violation of the Constitution. This transformed the President into a Nuclear Dictator.
Rather than renouncing that unconstitutional delegation of power by Congress destroying separation of powers, every President since Harry S. Truman has accepted that violation of the Constitution, or supreme law, they swore to uphold. Accepting this illegal power seems to violate the Presidential oath of office which requires the President to defend the Constitution. Accepting this power pretty much destroyed the heart and soul of the Constitution, and made every subsequent president an outlaw in any rational view.
I call on President Trump to renounce this most odious violation of separation of powers. I urge him to issue an Executive Order to restore the heart and soul of the Constitution. Declare to all the world, only the Congress can declare war and as President bound by his oath before god to defend the Constitution, he repudiates the Nuclear Dictatorship and orders all US military branches to refuse to follow an order to launch nuclear weapons unless Congress has declared war.
And, if the President does not do so, then the Congress, the Courts and the people must strip him of that usurpation. The greatest unconstitutional overreach destroying separation of powers is the Presidential usurpation of the power to declare war. Can we start by reversing that?
Kary Love, syndicated by PeaceVoice, is a Michigan attorney who has defended nuclear resisters in court for decades.
