This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, April 11th, 2011.

I'm Caleb Brown.

When you adopt a policy of repeatedly dropping bombs on a country,

you are at war with that country. Seems obvious. of in Libya, a war in Libya. One problem, says Congressman Tom McClintock,

a Republican of California.

Congress is supposed to be the branch that authorizes war.

He says any future president, Republican, or Democrat

who oversteps that authority should treat impeachment

as a real possibility.

He spoke at a Cato Institute Capitol Hill briefing last week.

I think it is appropriate that we're talking about the constitutional aspects of this

because before you can get to the policy issues, before you can get to the fiscal issues,

you have to be able to do it in a nation that is supposed to be ruled

by laws and not by the whims of men and women.

When the president ordered the attack on Libya

without congressional authorization,

I believe that he crossed a very bright constitutional line that he himself recognized in 2007 when he told the

Boston Globe these are his words the president does not have the power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military

attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation.

Those were his words. He was right then and he is absolutely dead wrong today.

The reason the American founders reserved the question of war to Congress was that they wanted to assure that so

momentous a decision could not be made by a single individual. They had watched

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