The silence, in short, meant that presidential power to start wars would remain largely unchecked. Schoen who made a broad study of that whole phenomenon.
The lawyers’ argument was simple: this nation’s wars can only be started – as a constitutional matter - with a formal declaration by Congress, and there was no such action before hundreds of thousands of troops were sent to war in South Vietnam and wave after wave of planes were sent on bombing raids over North Vietnam.Īnd yet, for all of that court activity, the Supreme Court never answered the core constitutional question – thus creating another legacy by its “strange silence,” in the words of Texas Tech law professor Rodric B. history has not been tested as much in the courts as was the conflict in Southeast Asia in the Sixties and Seventies. The constitutionality of any other war in U.S. That is one of the constitutional legacies of the Vietnam War.
In modern America, a march on Washington or some other mass protest in the streets may be the chosen method of exercising the First Amendment right to “petition the government for a redress of grievances.” More frequently, though, petitioning is done by filing a lawsuit. Most Americans learn even in grade school about one of the early protests, when a rowdy band of colonists dumped a boatload of tea into Boston harbor in 1773 to show their resentment of British taxation. The remaining Constitution Daily articles will appear next week.Īmericans were well aware, even before they had a Constitution with its First Amendment, that they had a right to express their grievances when government power was abused or misused. This article is keyed to the broadcast tonight, on the Vietnam conflict as it unfolded in 19. This is the second of several articles that Constitution Daily will publish on the constitutional legacy of the war in Vietnam, with each article focused on a theme that is being explored in episodes this week and next of the PBS documentary, “The Vietnam War, ” by Ken Burns and Lynn Novick.
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