Quite possibly, another war, civil unrest, the future economy an the debt all could result depending on who is elected and can have effects on ones life. So yes it will be changed.

"The president either can't do much without a congress or just goes over congress to get stuff done."

Which is happening more and more, and this should worry both parties (and Congress). I'll admit in all candor that I convinced myself I didn't mind while it was Bush, someone of my party. In truth now, I think that was just as objectionable, and we should all be most disquieted by the way the last two Presidents have treated executive power. (But I'll be fair and give Dems the same pass I gave myself -- for one President).

yeah and if that president had a red background behind his name youd support his war powers too.

The expansion of presidential war power is not a new phenomena. In order to address it there will need to be a constitutional convention.

The social and political climate I live in will be (perhaps "can be" is more appropriate) changed dramatically...

But my economic status won't likely change a bit due to whoever's sitting there in Pennsylvania Avenue's biggest house.

I will expand and explain. The constitutional war powers provisions actually give the president a great deal of latitude as you know semck. The exploitation of this lattitude is not a new phenomina and was used extensively in the early republic by presidents such as Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln. If you want the power to make war back with congress you need to make an amendment that clears up all ambiguity.

The Constitution doesn't really have ambiguity. The president can't start a war without Congressional approval, except in response to an attack or an imminent attack. The sad irony is that the Iraq War may have been illegal under international law but was constitutional in that Bush went to Congress for authorization, while Obama bombing Libya was legal under international law but entirely unconstitutional.

As commander-in-chief a president can PHYSICALLY start a war if he decides to, but without a declaration of war, authorization of force, or response to an attack that action is lawless and he ought to be impeached. If Romney wins (knock wood) and starts a war with Iran without such authorization I'll say the same thing.

The President of the United States should not be the Warlord of Earth, but that is what he's become. It didn't start with Obama, but it ended with him. We don't need to amend the Constitution, we need to follow it.

As for the original topic, I don't think my life will personally change right away. But it's a real crossroads we're at. Invictus at 40 or 60 (I'm early 20s now) will be very different in the world where Obama wins than the one where Romney wins. With Obama we'll have four more years of total inaction in solving the financial crisis which threatens to consume this country, with Romney we may have at least a half-way serious go at fixing things.

I wasn't only talking about war powers, SC. I was talking about Presidential power generally. As for war powers -- the Iraq war was already palling on me toward the end of Bush's tenure, so I doubt I'd have been that happy to see the same abuses continue. Obama's treatment of the war powers haven't upset me too terribly, though. I do think he's been shockingly heavy-handed domestically a few times, though.

As for the war powers -- I'll happily take them as they are over a new convention. They could be fixed up a little, no doubt, but I think simple amendments to the War Powers Resolution, and perhaps a modest amendment. Congress has at least as much incentive to do this (next time there's any peace anyway) as a convention would, so I'll trust them to look into it in the medium term if it needs to happen. Sadly, "clearing up all ambiguity" isn't something that's likely to happen, at least not in a happy way. Sometimes ambiguity is needed. (Many of Lincoln's abuses really were necessary to fight the war).

"Obama's treatment of the war powers haven't upset me too terribly, though."

They should.

Yeah you're probably right.

"The Constitution doesn't really have ambiguity. The president can't start a war without Congressional approval, except in response to an attack or an imminent attack. The sad irony is that the Iraq War may have been illegal under international law but was constitutional in that Bush went to Congress for authorization, while Obama bombing Libya was legal under international law but entirely unconstitutional.

As commander-in-chief a president can PHYSICALLY start a war if he decides to, but without a declaration of war, authorization of force, or response to an attack that action is lawless and he ought to be impeached. If Romney wins (knock wood) and starts a war with Iran without such authorization I'll say the same thing.

The President of the United States should not be the Warlord of Earth, but that is what he's become. It didn't start with Obama, but it ended with him. We don't need to amend the Constitution, we need to follow it. "

"can't start a war"

Wrong, coming from a self professed constitution loving conservative this is rich, but then again I have come to expect it. It explicitly reads congress shall declare war. In fact in the constitutional conventon there were debates on whether it should read "Make War" in order to make sure the president had very little war power, this was rejected because it was understood that the President needed some war powers, like you said, to protect the country from attack. What constitutes an attack has broadened, but the usage of the ambguity created by the clause is as old as the country and has been exploited, first by Washington, next by Adams, two times by Jefferson, then Lincoln etc. etc. There was no point in time where the commander in chief followed Invictus definition of war powers.

So, like I said, there needs to be a constitutional convention.

You didn't really answer any of my points against a constitutional convention, SC.

So please do.

But also, how exactly would you amend the Constitution to prevent these abuses?

* I meant an amendment not a constitutional convention

I haven't thought the how through, I just know its not simple to say "follow the constitution" when the constitution as taught by the book has not been followed since day 1 (or more like year 3).

My point isn't necessarily that there should be an amendment, I'm saying there needs to be strict guidelines in place that separate presidential and congressional wartime functions and they need to be followed, and the only way that I could fathom actually working is a congressional amendment . Neither the Constitution nor the War powers resolutions (for lack of any teeth or desire to enforce it) provide these.

and I didn't answer them because I was responding to Invictus. You didn't answer any of my historical points either. So there.

Oh OK.

Phew. An amendment is more reasonable, though I'm not convinced necessary. A convention seemed like overkill.

Anyway, an amendment _could_ be good, but the thing is, it would be ignored anyway if there seemed to be an "emergency." I mean, let's face it, some of the things we're talking about were CLEARLY unconstitutional. All that an amendment would add is the clear ability to go to the Supreme Court to get them to stop the President, but I have an extremely hard time seeing them issue an order to the army to ignore the President.

It's definitely a very thorny problem.

"and I didn't answer them because I was responding to Invictus."

Yeah I noticed that afterward. Sorry.

But the reason I didn't answer the historical points is because I don't really disagree with them.

No one has as much influence over who is elected to the senate or the house than the President. That Obama has failed to help elect a friendly congress is his own fault, especially considering all he had going for him (the fractured nature of the Republicans combined with the rise of the lunatic fringe should have been a Democratic President's wet dream). We should be in the middle of an era of unparalleled Democratic dominance across the board. That we are not shows just how much influence a President has.

The fact is that nothing will change. If Obama is reelected, the House will stonewall the crap out of him for the next four years. If Romney is elected, the Senate (which will likely retain at least enough Dems to filibuster everything) will stonewall him. The sad fact is that the two parties have no real motivation to compromise.

Gunfighter, my thesis is that the next four years will be decided by house and senate elections more than by presidential election. If there were no possibility of overturn in congress, I'd heartily agree with you. While congressional overturn is slower, it would not be unheard of for one or both houses to strengthen or lose control this year. Even two years ago, republicans weakened in their power but so did the democrats due to the tea party. So I'd be surprised if something doesn't change this year, if only a return to more republican roots instead of tea party.

Octavious, I think the main area Obama has failed to shape congress as unparalleled democratic success is in his PR of "Obama care" and especially in his PR of bin laden. The latter should have been held up as a military triumph of the democrats and rubbed the republican warmongering faces in it. Instead, his office botched both of these critical points.

"Even two years ago, republicans weakened in their power"

What do you mean, dub? The Republicans took back the house and diminished the Democratic lead in the Senate....

I mean they weren't as unified due to the tea party. Certain republican proposals fell flat because the fringe group wouldn't compromise at all. So yes, the party name gained control of the house, but it was splitting that power amongst the core and a fringe.

Right, but.... wouldn't you say they were still more powerful than when they had a MINORITY in the house?

Let me give you an example. In 2009, the Republicans wanted to stop the Obamacare bill, and they couldn't. Now, they have successfully stopped whatever they wanted. Ergo, they have more power.

Republican party and tea party have some common interests. Just because they together stopped democratic proposals does not mean that one has gained strength. An ally sometimes. An antagonist other times.

Um, the tea party is a strict subset of the Republican party, dubmdell, not a separate party. It's a nice try, defining part of the Republicans as "not Republican," but I can show you the list of House members. A majority are Republicans. Period. I might as well say that the Democrats have really lost power in the last few years, ever since the progressives won the Presidency.

The Republicans have a majority in the House, and have been remarkably unified in using it to gain their ends (which, with the Senate and Presidency controlled by the other party, have largely been stopping the Democrats, and passing bills for rhetorical reasons).

A strict subset whose goals and means are sometimes in conflict with the larger party.

Yes, and that's been true at every point in American history. There are factions within parties that don't always see eye to eye. The point remains that the Republican party AS A WHOLE (which includes the tea party) substantially gained power in the 2010 midterms.

It's illegitimate to try to define the Republican party as the "non-tea-party part" of the Republican party. The party is simply defined as those who are members of the party.

Okay, but you've sort of missed the intent of what I was saying by fussing over phraseology. With the advent of the tea party movement, there was a political climate shift in the congress that significantly affected both dems and repubs. You can say all you want that the tea party is merely a subset of the republicans, but it is still a distinct subset that made a splash both antagonistically and sympathetically to the two political parties. We can quibble all day about just how antagonistic and sympathetic the tea party movement was to the republicans and democrats, but I'd be surprised if you disagree that it hasn't been a thorn in the sides of the republicans at times.

Also, the tea party movement really screwed with vocabulary because of calling themselves the "tea party." So whenever I was to refer to them, the correct title is "tea party" whether I am considering them a separate party from the republican party or not (and depending on the analysis, there are advantages to both positions). So please do not quibble so fiercely over the ill-chosen name of a political group. I can only do so much with grammar to convey meaning.

Yes, dub, but it's not just quibbling -- sorry. And it's you who are choosing to misinterpret the "ill-chosen name" of a political group. You continue in this analysis to view the tea party as distinct from (as in outside of) the Republican party, by saying it has been a "thorn in the side" of the Republican party. It's been PART OF the Republican party. You might as well say the midwest has been a thorn in the side of the United States.

The tea party has at times been a thorn in the side of the REST of the Republican party, although all of the GOP has typically acknowledged that the tea party is what helped them gain power in the House in 2010. And since last year's debt ceiling debacle, there actually haven't been that many big squabbles between the tea party and the rest of the House GOP.

(Essentially, the TP should be viewed as a shift within the GOP, not as a sometimes-enemy without. There is no justification for the alternative point of view.).

I see precious little difference between Obama and Romney. Obama may accelerate America's steady drift towards European-style socialism or welfare state or whatever you want to call it, but I hear very little substantive, fundamental philosophical difference in Romney's campaign. It's like arguing over the color of paint on your prison wall - does it really matter?

"It's like arguing over the color of paint on your prison wall - does it really matter?
"

I'm sure glad deluded people like you don't bother to vote.

WTF is up with many white American males and their sense of over-the-top hyperemotional, paranoia? I don't get it. Of all the groups, we are the least restricted or targeted by the government, and yet we're the most paranoid. Meanwhile women are having rods being forced into their vaginas by state governments, and you don't hear them claiming that Obama vs Romney doesn't matter because we're all in "prison" anyway.

As it happens, I do vote. Primaries, caucuses, general elections - school board, congress, president, river-boat casino licensing, whatever, I'm at the polls. I'm just not locked into voting for people I don't really believe in. Several cases in point: I'm a registered Republican but I voted for an independent in the last gubernatorial race, and this summer I voted against an incumbent Republican county commissioner (we threw the bums out by huge margins, both incumbent Republicans lost big). Oh yeah, and I voted for Bill Clinton in '96.

As to my turn of phrase about paint on the prison wall, you'll notice that I used the word "like", meaning that I'm using a simile, or an analogy if you will. So before we go throwing stones about hyperemotional, paranoid people perhaps we should check the mirror first.

Maybe instead of calling names you could provide some substantive reasons why YOU think there's an important difference between Obama and Romney. I'd be curious to hear. And I might even be pursuaded - I am an open-minded voter!

Simple fact: both parties can coherently function and turn this economy around.

If you think Obama can clean up this mess, vote for him. If you don't, then don't. As long as we have the kind of Congress we have, it will take strong leadership on the President's part to turn things around.

"Simple fact: both parties can coherently function and turn this economy around."

The economic problems in this country are systemic. I don't see either party as seriously willing to upset the established economic order. There will be no serious changes with regard to government economic policy whether Obamney or Rombama win. As a result, the "Great Recession" will continue indefinitely, while the punditocracy - dependent almost entirely on advertising revenue generated only by those who have managed to remain wealthy through the present economic turmoil (and thus have no incentive to change anything) - will continue to insist that things "aren't that bad".

Yes until we go onto the gold standard which somehow solves everything when it was an inadequate system at the turn of the twentieth century.

Lets go back to a system where the economy pretty much completely crashed every twenty years. What we have now does not come close to comparing what occured under gold backed currency.

Real currency (gold, silver, and other previous metals) have been used as money by civilizations for over two and a half millenia. Paper money, on the other hand, has been so abused by governments and bankers over the centuries that they have frequently fallen into disuse - with the public refusing to accept them - only to be revived when governments were so desperate for cash (and public awareness of the perils of paper dissolved by the solvent of time) that they could get away with printing massive amounts of money, whose 'value' was generated from the evaporation of the purchasing power of real wealth and labor.

Santa knows this (or ought to know this) well. Inflation of paper currencies was so rampant during the Revolution and early Republic that the framers (not a radical bunch by any measure) specifically declared in the constitution that only gold and silver would be considered money - an express repudiation of the paper money standard which governments and bankers have abused at the expense of the general public for centuries.

Throughout the 19th century, governments and regional banks issued their own fractionally-backed paper currencies. It was this - and not a reliance on hard currency - that led to the "completely crashed every twenty years" boom-and-bust cycle. It was the collapse of the malinvestment in railroads encouraged by the federal government and financed by Jay Cooke (made possible by the paper Greenbacks printed by the federal government from the Civil War until the closure of the Gold Window by Nixon) that led to the Panic of 1873, for instance.

A real value standard (not necessarily a gold standard) such as proposed by Ron Paul would be a great improvement over the system we've had for the last hundred years, where bank/government bureaucrats try to decide every quarter what our money is going to be worth next quarter. As most of us have seen in our lifetimes, wages have stagnated and purchasing power has fallen in this system while the banks and those closest to the distribution of government fiat money - government workers and government contractors - have become quite wealthy. Home ownership has fallen to about 2%, as nearly the whole population of the country has been induced into 30-year debt peonage contracts (a "mortgage") to banks who hold title to the property they live in and can boot them out of their home at any time. Is this an improvement over the 19th century, when most people owned the land they lived on and worked, and faced no risk of homelessness by the bursting of an inflationary market bubble? I certainly don't think so.

To answer the original post, I doubt it.

@Tolstoy - three cheers. "Legal tender laws have long been used by governments to force citizens to accept debased currency." - Ron Paul

"As it happens, I do vote."

Why do you do something that you claim is pointless/doesn't matter? Bored?

As for the differences between the leader of the Democratic Party and the leader of the Tea Party infested Republicans, I don't know why I should even bother. The two parties are poles apart on everything from womens rights, to healthcare reform, to tax policy, to affirmative action, to environmental policy, to immigration policy, to monetary policy, to education policy, and everything else. Just what does the Tea Party have to do to not be called a welfare socialist by you? Privatize the entire government? That's practically what they want to do anyway. If you can't see the differences then you're either dishonest or too far out there on the extreme right to have a sensible opinion about anything.