Marbury v. Madison took the written U.S. Constitution and superseded it with a British style system of an unwritten constitutionality.  This was judicial review and it lasted until the New Deal when the jurisprudence of limited government figured out that the Executive Branch was just as able to modify the unwritten rules as was the Judicial.  Oops.

Do you really think the states and the people respectively would have allowed this Empire to come about?  So, yeah, war powers under the “written part” of the Constitution matter.  That doesn’t mean there aren’t exceptions to be found under the “unwritten part”, where war powers rules don’t matter.  While the “unwritten part” includes jurisprudence, it obviously also just includes whatever the hell people can get away with based on whatever deals they have made in back rooms.

If the written Constitution mattered, we’d have added 200 to the list of 13 things Congress can do.  The states, under the X Amendment, could rule on constitutionality.  Rules are rules aren’t they?  If words can just be “interpreted”, then they’re not rules.  The writing part is symbolic, the real constitution is just a running consensus.

Hey American legal, military, and government officials?  When you swore an oath to the Constitution, you do realize that all you did was bound yourself to something which does not bind your leadership?  We need a reset.  Unfortunately, that’s just what the powerful want as well.  In. my. opinion.