Massachusetts v. Laird (1970) saw the Supreme Court turn down a challenge from the state of Massachusetts that the Vietnam War was being waged unlawfully and unconstitutionally. The defendant in the case was Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird. Massachusetts passed a law stating that none of its residents could be conscripted into the Vietnam conflict on the grounds that Congress had never issued a formal declaration of war.The Court declined to hear the case in a 6-3 vote for lack of jurisdiction. Justice William O. Douglas dissented. He quoted Massachusetts v. Mellon from 47 years earlier in which the Court had ruled that a state lacked standing to constitutionally challenge a Federal aid program it charged with usurping a power belonging to the states. Douglas went on to say that although a state may act to defend its rights against unconstitutional acts by the Federal government, no such situation arose here. The Mellon case involved an act of Congress whereas here Massachusetts protested the absence of Congressional action. Mellon's companion case, Massachusetts v. Frothingham, had seen the Court rule that a taxpayer could not file suit against a Federal spending bill. The two cases had been decided by the Taft Court which was a strong advocate of substantiative due process, a doctrine the Court had since moved away from. The Court had partially overturned Frothingham in the recent Flast v. Cohen case.
Frothingham had challenged a Federal regulatory act dealing with maternity leave in which the plaintiff charged that the act deprived him of property without due process of law. "When the Court used substantive due process to determine the wisdom or reasonableness of legislation, it was indeed transforming itself into the Council of Revision which was rejected by the Constitutional Convention. It was that judicial attitude, not the theory of standing to sue rejected in Frothingham, that involved 'important hazards for the continued effectiveness of the federal judiciary,' to borrow a phrase from my Brother Harlan. A contrary result in Frothingham in that setting might have accentuated an ominous trend to judicial supremacy.'"The Flast ruling held that a private citizen could challenge a Federal spending bill if it exceeded Congress's alloted powers, whereas in Frothingham the plaintiff argued for Congress exceeding its authority under its taxation power rather than that it violated a specific provision of the Constitution. Mellon had also been partially overturned with time--in Alabama v. United States (1963) the state of Alabama charged that the president had exceeded his statutory authority by using the National Guard to enforce civil rights. The Court declined to hear the case on the grounds that there was no constitutional question at stake and the president was acting in his role as commander in chief.
In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) the Court declined South Carolina's challenge that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 constituted a bill of attainder on the grounds that the constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder protected private parties, not governments (the VRA itself was upheld as a means of enforcing the 15th Amendment). Douglas went on to say that the Court had since at least 1900 recognized on multiple occasions that a state could file suit if the health, safety, and rights of its citizens were menaced, and that the possibility of Massachusetts residents being conscripted into Vietnam may well constitute such a menace to their rights.The Constitution states that the president shall not wage war without an act of Congress. Although Congress had passed no declaration of war since December 8, 1941 (and as of 2024 has yet to do so again), the United States had waged two major military conflicts in Korea and Vietnam since, neither with a formal declaration of war. Whether or not Congressional acts such as authorizing defense appropriations for those conflicts passed the required constitutional test and counted as Congressional consent to wage war was a matter of debate. That the Constitution imposed limits on the executive branch's authority to wage war was not in question; the first such case was the Civil War-era Prize Cases. More recently, in Youngstown Sheet & Tube v. Sawyer (1952) the Court had overturned President Truman's attempt to nationalize a steel mill via executive order. In Mora v. McNamara only three years before Laird, the Court had declined to hear a suit by draftees that they could not be shipped overseas.
>>17437634>In South Carolina v. Katzenbach (1966) the Court declined South Carolina's challenge that the Voting Rights Act of 1965 constituted a bill of attainder on the grounds that the constitutional prohibition on bills of attainder protected private parties, not governments (the VRA itself was upheld as a means of enforcing the 15th Amendment)I'm not sure what SC thought they were going to accomplish with that one. The CRA does rest on sketchy constitutional grounds, everyone knows that but the Voting Rights Act was clearly a vehicle to enforce the 15th Amendment.
>MA is a super-blue state that overwhelmingly voted for LBJ in '64>wait, you can't draft our kids into 'Nam Mr. President. fuck you.You got what you asked for, guys.
>>17437689Goldwater promised to start World War III over Vietnam, you think he'd have been any better?
>>17437634on that note IDK why they stopped doing proper declarations of war after WW2
>>17437718I wonder if it has something to do with the fact that the "enemy" keeps shapeshifting. I would wonder, for example, how Congress would be expected to declare war on every ISIS-like organization that pops up, just in order to do counter-terror ops. As much as we would like to limit war, it seems to me like limiting the commander-in-chief to this extent would only potentially hamstring the US national interest. Not to mention it might only ironically cause more war to start; when US leadership has failed to act in the past, it often meant opportunistic adversaries took that as a green light and escalated conflict. You can look at any time period since December 7, 1941.I think the declaration of war still exists as an avenue that would rarely need to be used. It would be used in order to confirm that another sovereign entity with whom the US has, until very recently, had diplomatic relations, is now subject to hostilities. It would clear up any doubts as to the legality, as far as the US is concerned, about the armed forces attacking the target of the declaration. In the case of hostile entities such as rebellions who are not even recognized as sovereign states, it seems like this wouldn't be necessary. That doesn't mean I think the President should just attack whoever, but I think there are good reasons why they should have discretion to act in the national interest since someone ultimately has to make these decisions.
