[wredcoll]

> Most notably, only Congress can declare war, which has been a real sticking point in the last century and why, for example, the Korean War wasn't technically a war (it was a "police action") and why the Vietnam War wasn't either.

I keep seeing this brought up as some kind of "gotcha" point, but those wars involved conscription and billions of dollars of additonal military funding, all of which was presumably approved by congress. I find it hard to imagine a congress that is approving a draft would be averse to signing a war declaration.

[jmyeet]

It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam.

If anything it demonstrates a more recent trend where the executive oversteps its authority to engage in military action and to bypass Congress.

As for conscription, this was enabled by Congress in WW2 by "selective service" [1]. The administration maintains the authority to draft male citizens of a certain age into the military without explicit Congressional approval.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Sta...

[nobody9999]

>It's not a "gotcha". It's just objective fact. There were no war resolutions for Korea and Vietnam.

Yeah. Not so much.

While the Korean conflict was not explicitly authorized by Congress, it was tacitly approved by Congress by passing several bills that both directly and indirectly appropriated funds to prosecute the Korean conflict.

That this wasn't followed up by a vote in Congress to make that official is definitely a constitutional issue, but one that SCOTUS did not address directly.

You're quite correct that Congress didn't declare war or provide explicit authorization for the use of military force. That said, it's not quite as cut and dried as you make it out to be.[0][1][2]

Congress gave the Executive branch explicit authorization for the use of military force in Vietnam with the Tonkin Gulf Resolution[3].

[0] https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/essay/artI-S8-C11-2...

[1] https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/korea-war-powers-preced...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youngstown_Sheet_%26_Tube_Co._...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulf_of_Tonkin_Resolution

Edit: To clarify, I'm not arguing that Congress was correct in not providing explicit authorization for the Korean conflict, nor am I arguing that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations shouldn't have gone to Congress sooner to obtain authorization ala the Tonkin Gulf Resolution. Rather, I'm pointing out that the situation was much more complicated than you make out WRT the Korean Conflict and that there was, in fact, explicit authorization from Congress for prosecuting the war in Vietnam.

[cwillu]

The gotcha is that, given the thing is described as a war by more or less everyone in the world, clearly the power to declare a “war” has little to do with the power to start or join wars.