Where Is the Commander-In-Chief Threshold?

For the sake of argument, I am going to take the Clinton campaign statements about the "Commander-in-Chief threshold" at face value. Clinton stated that both she and Senator McCain have passed it, while Senator Obama has not. Neither Clinton nor McCain have ever served in a position that would be considered the Commander-in-Chief - not even as a governor of a state that would consider that executive position the Commander-in-Chief of a National Guard. Howard Wolfson has even said that Obama has not passed the Commander-in-Chief threshold "at this time." In reading these statements, we can deduce that such a threshhold is not a real thing, but a statement of philosophy. So without any concrete experience, how are we defining what a Commander-in-Chief is? Which philosophy does Clinton believe? I don't think I need to mention that the idea has become somewhat impermanent of late.

More after the jump...

In the Bush era, the Commander-in-Chief philosophy has been synonymous with the unitary executive theory, that pesky Poli Sci 101 term that holds that the President, and not any other government body, has power over administrative actions in the Executive Branch. George W. Bush expanded this past where previous presidents like Lincoln and Truman took it to essentially say that military actions were unreviewable by any legislative body and that the military was essentially an arm of the Executive Branch of government. This is what the "Commander-in-Chief" has become in the modern lexicon: the ultimate Roman imperator from which all military power is disseminated downwards.

Naturally it will be the responsibility of the new president to undo this damaging paradigm - they will need to allow the legislative and judicial brances of government to reassert control if our democracy is to retain its health. In this situation, I think that in vetting these candidates we should ask exactly where the Commander-in-Chief threshold is. Is it where the Constitution places it, as a war-monitoring position, or is it where George w. Bush has placed it, as a war-making position? So far Hillary has not effectively made that distinction, instead saying that she has crossed the line and therefore should be president. But making this distinction is important, because having someone who has crossed the Commander in Chief threshold would be damaging to the country if that threshold is where Bush has placed the line.

There's been a big fight between the ideologues and the non-ideologues in the Democratic party, and by and large they have aligned behind the two separate candidates: the ideologues who essentially want to reverse the Bush situation and bring the traditional Democratic communities into power over Republican communities have aligned behind Hillary, and the non-ideologues who would like to bring a bipartisan unity between the two parties in an effort to redefine and pluralize the nature of left and right have aligned behind Obama. It is important that both sides understand, though, exactly how the government structure and the practice of power would be different with either candidate. Whereas on these bread-and-butter issues they may not be different, I believe Hillary and Obama have very different ideas about how their government would be run, and we haven't had enough discussion of this beyond the repeating of phrases and concepts like "Commander-in-Chief", "experience", "national security", and "change" which can mean very different things depending on who is saying them. When the meanings of words and concepts have been changed and warped by the previous president, I think it is important that we take some time to remind ourselves of the vocabulary and reestablish some definitions.