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this post was submitted on 22 Jun 2025
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The speed Congress gave up their constitutional powers to avoid repurcusions for having opinions and voting for them is crazy. But I guess being able to give yourself a raise every year for doing nothing is tempting.
The actual purpose of congress is to violently enforce capitalism by rubber stamping imperialism, policing, prisons, etc.
To be fair to the US Congress (AFAIK) no one as been formally at war since 1945 - and unless I'm forgetting anything it would actually make the US Congress the last ones to declare war on anyone.
Since WW2 everything is framed as a peacekeeping mission (when approved even if only implicitly by the UN Security Council), a civil war, helping the legitimate government in a civil war (US in Vietnam or Soviet Union in Afghanistan for example), or when every other excuse fails a pre-emptive special military operation (US in Iraq, Russia in Ukraine, Israel in all of their neighbours + Iran).
And this is a good thing. Declarations of war makes war a legitimate thing. In the past it was a noble and goodly thing to do, all of the correct paperwork has been submitted and so now it's good and proper for you to go over there and kill those people that have different uniforms.
Also a declaration of war means going from 0 to 100 on everything. There's no escalation and also no de-escalation. Probably not a good thing to instantly go 0 to 100 once nuclear weapons became a thing.
People often decry how war is no longer a legitimate thing because there's no longer declarations of war. The reality is, war never was a legitimate thing. Declarations of war were just powerful people making the act of sending people out to kill and be killed seem legitimate.
Yes, the "special operations" and "coalitions of the willing" stuff is bullshit. But so were declarations of war. It's better you think about whether a military action is actually needed rather than believing a war is proper simply because the people in power did the paperwork correctly.
Declarations of war are bad, but they were made hard to do in modern states. Almost every single countries have rules and procedures in place to make sure a hot head can't do it over the weekend.
"Special Military Operations" undid all those efforts by putting all the powers back in the hands of a single person.
Classic war just doesn't have any appeal these days