ity to go to war without a declaration or a vote of Parliament. I believe that these critics are forgetting the ardent points our forefathers made when writing the constitution. The last thing they wanted was the President of the United States to have the same unitary powers as the King or Prime Minister. That is why they intricately built the system of checks and balances, to protect us against a branch of government with too much power. I have chosen a few integral pieces of American history to illustrate how Presidents have responded in the past to situations involving national security and how they dealt with, or circumvented Congress on the issue.
             President George Washington set the precedent of Presidential response to domestic national security issues in the "Whiskey Rebellion" in 1795. Western Pennsylvanians refused to pay taxes on whiskey and decided to revolt. Washington desired not the bloodshed of his own countrymen, but a peaceful conclusion to this uprising. Not only did Washington form an army, he led the army himself, to make peace and calm his people down. It was at this page in history that President Washington established the precedent to form troops to bring domestic peace. Sixty-six years later, President Abraham Lincoln was faced with a much graver problem. States began to secede from the Union, the South attacked Fort Sumter, and Lincoln had to fight back for the sake of national security and essentially run the war alone, also suspending the Writ of Habeas Corpus. Lincoln's enumerated powers during this war have been reveled and attempted by many recent Presidents, however people must realize the context of his situation and how it's gravity is incomparable with any situation since then.
             In the 1930's there was a visible growth in the office of the Presidency. In Franklin D. Roosevelt's first inaugural address in 1932, he asked for wartime powers to meet a peaceti...