Interesting take and excellent points, as always, from S. Coughlin: https://twitter.com/S_Coughlin_DC/status/1936727565269393741
Quoting:
There is nothing in the Constituion that ever said that the Presidents execution of his Article II powers was contingent on Congress declaring war.
War is a legal status that can (and usually does) involve the use of militay force. Short of that, the President has some discretion on the use of force short of war.
When TR launched the USN’s Great White Fleet (b/c Great Britain’s Royal Navy was black), Congress only gave him enough funds to keep the navy operational. So, TR sent the navy to the other side of the world and told Congress that if they want the Navy back, they better cough up the funds.
Congress controls the purse. That’s their leverage. This debate, always a kabuke, always plays out this way.
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The War Powers Act is Congress’s take on its own powers, born at the height of Democratic Party / Neo-Liberal power, just after the Vietnam War, and just before the Nixon Coup.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_Powers_Resolution
The Constitutional question has never really been put to the test.
The president is the ‘monarchical principle’ of the state, our Sovereign in effect, and the president can make war. As with the Stuart Absolute monarchs, the primary restraint on the King by Parliament is the power of the purse. Our constitution is very similar to its model, the British constitution, in this regard. [There are better theories of the relation of King to the Magnates and People, in a Zemsky-like Sobor, of course, but I am speaking of Anglo-American political theory here, in its Whig and Tory variants. Our variant in North America was the *Continental Congress*]
Another thing found nowhere in the constitution: that Congress has the power to *compel* the Executive to either spend all monies voted to it, or to prescribe in detail how those monies are to be spent, in a way that limits executive power so that it cannot function.
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