The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons: Kings had always been involving and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object. This our convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions, and they resolved so to frame the Constitution that no man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.—Abraham Lincoln.
I was saying the other night that I know of no case where one people made war upon another people. No government can make war in the United States. The people make war through their representatives. The Constitution of the United States does not give the President even a participating part in the making of war. War can be declared only by Congress, by an action which the President does not take part in, and cannot veto. I am literally, by constitutional arrangement, the mere servant of the people’s representatives.--Woodrow Wilson
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the bludgeoning down of all domestic opposition to the war was excused only on the plea that, once we were at war, there was no choice except between victory and disaster. It was upon this assumption that so many prominent persons, who opposed war up to the declaration, became “now-that-we’re-in” patriots. They were willing to support a war which they believed to be unjust, merely because it had begun. Under the circumstances that America happened to be in, there was no defensible reason why any one who opposed the war before April 6, 1917, should have favored it after that date.
Shall it be again ?
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