When Barack Obama bombed Libya in 2011, a number of conservative voices spoke out against the president starting an unconstitutional war. Those Republicans insisted that presidents must go through Congress to declare war, as Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution requires. As James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson in a 1798 letter: “The Constitution supposes, what the history of all governments demonstrates, that the executive is the branch of power most interested in war, and most prone to it. It has accordingly with studied care, vested the question of war in the legislature.”...
