Trump's Unlawful Attack in Syria

"It should be more easy to get out of war than into it," Oliver Ellsworth told the Philadelphia Convention on August 17, 1787.

With the malignant political genius of the nuclear age, Americans have reversed that order of things.

War now takes but a wave of the executive hand, but seems impossible to end. Congress authorized military action against Al Qaeda in 2001, and against the government of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein in 2002. Hussein is long gone, and Al Qaeda may or may not still exist; legally, however, these wars grind on, the longest-running pair in American history.

Thursday night, without a word to Congress or the public, the Trump Administration impulsively began a third conflict. Neither of the existing authorizations could even remotely be said to authorize Thursday's