No War Is Illegal (When They All Are) [SUBSCRIBER-ONLY]

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Hey everyone, this is Leon from Prologue Projects. On this subscriber only episode of 5-4,

“Peter, Reannon, and Michael are telling the story of war in America. And tracing the evolution”

of the law around who in the government gets to decide when the country starts one. As the

Trump White House continues its war in Iran, it felt like a good time to take a look at what the constitution has to say about the power to declare war. And how various presidents from both parties have pushed this power to its absolute limits, broadening it so that America can drop bombs wherever the president wants without congressional approval. This is 5-4, a podcast about how much the Supreme Court and the unchecked power of the executive to wreak havoc around the globe.

Sock. Welcome to 5-4, where we dissect the analysis of Supreme Court cases that have closed off our rights, like Iran closing off the straight of war moves. I'm Peter. I'm here with Michael. Hey everybody. And Reannon. Straight of shut. Shut. That's a lot of people being like, "Oh, Trump's going to taco." And I'm like, "Maybe, maybe Trump will chicken out, but it's not really up to him anymore." Now is he? He doesn't really get to decide when the straight

opens. Yeah. Yeah. No, Benjamin Netanyahu does. Sock. Our glorious king, one level above the

president. It's the first time in a while we've done a topical, open metaphor. One that ties into

the episode because today we are talking about war powers. The power to declare and conduct wars. But this has been of course in the news a bit lately with Trump's actions in Venezuela and especially Iran. And it's confusing. And I imagine that most people are watching the news wondering what exactly the law says about this. You might hear someone say, "This is an illegal war." And you're like, "What was that mean?" Right? What does that mean in this context? So we're going to walk you through

the law and the history and explain how past generations lead the groundwork for Donald Trump, for Donald Trump to swoop in and do Donald Trump shit. Yeah. We're going to talk about some history and how the hell we got to where we are in terms of a context of modern warfare that puts us in endless, constant, perpetuated wars with other countries all of the time now. Wars that are executed in many different ways in terms of operations, whether that's like cyber attacks, drones,

strikes, outright bombing, invasion, all of these things. But meanwhile, we have this modern context of how warfare is done in the year 2026. But meanwhile, you have this history of very limited or not as much as you would expect in terms of congressional action. On war, we have only declared war against other countries officially 11 times in the total existence of the United States. We have not done that since World War II. But okay, wait, in the last 26 years, we have had,

“you know, outright three full-scale wars. We have bombed at least 10 countries. I think that”

is a conservative estimate. I think that the U.S. in terms of cyber attack and drones, strikes

I don't think it can be overstated. We've been a very sort of militaristic society, but that has

“ramped up after 9/11 to an extreme degree, both domestically and abroad. Right at home, you have surveillance”

that are broad. You have invasions. You have drones. You have, you know, all of that.

And so what you're going to see throughout this discussion as we build on, you know, what is the

history of the war powers, the authorization, whether the president or congress, what we're going to see is these common themes that there are bad faith arguments about what the definition of war

is. What does it, if the president has some limited authority to do war? Well, what does it mean

if the president says, well, I'm not doing war, right? I'm doing something else by initiating war

“or bombing. And I think what we're also going to talk about throughout this history,”

certainly certainly in the modern era, is really a lack of political will in both political branches, but especially in congress to constrain the executive branch, to constrain the president as commander and chief in doing all of this war and getting us to where we are right now.

“Hey, folks, if you want to hear the rest of this episode, you're going to have to subscribe.”

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