What Now? (Part One)

President Obama has taken Washington by surprise by requesting Congressional support prior to taking military action against Syria.

To be sure, like all modern presidents, Mr. Obama maintains that he has the necessary authority to act without Congressional approval.  Nonetheless, he's asking Congress to back him up, for some reason.

We should probably leave it there.  The President's justification for inviting Congressional backup has been - like almost every aspect of his approach to Syria - a bewildering muddle of inconsistent arguments.  One of the advantages of having a magnificent speaking voice is that you don't have to make a logical argument to sound persuasive.

Let's just say this:  The President's sudden decision to include Congress in the process came on the heels of Prime Minister David Cameron's inviting Britain's House of Commons to vote on his proposal to join the US in taking military action - and the Commons' stunning rejection of such action.

And again, I have to stop myself from going on.  Speculating about what the President  is thinking is just such a tempting topic.  And we're going to be hearing a lot about it from our personality and process obsessed media.

Professors and pundits will be dissecting the President's decision in terms of its  political and constitutional aspects.  Did this decision arise from presidential weakness - or strength?  Is it the product of crafty political calculation - or a wimpy desire to avoid a difficult decision?  Does it represent a shift of power from the White House to the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue - or a nifty maneuver to regain the initiative from Congress?

These are all interesting questions, but they aren't immediately important.  What's immediately important is that, between now and when Congress reassembles on September 9, we - the People - might actually have a chance to determine what our country does about one important issue.

Because, whatever his motives, when Mr. Obama asked Congress to vote on his military plans, he also invited the American people to let Congress know what we want. 

And this is a rare opportunity.

We live in an era in which the will of the people is almost irrelevant.  Congressional districts are gerrymandered in such a way that a great majority of Representatives come from single-party districts.  As a result, most members of the House are extremists - hyper-partisan Democrats or Republicans who have no interest in compromise.  Yet this comes at a time when the largest part of the American population - around 40% - rejects both parties.  A time at which somewhat less than 10% of the American people approves of Congress.

With Congress thus disconnected from the people it supposedly represents, the President has tossed out a major policy question on which neither party has a clear position. 

It's almost unprecedented, but the question of taking military action against Syria is simply not one of those issues in which there is a clear-cut Democratic or Republican policy.  

Everyone assumed that the President would be making this decision himself, so the default Republican position was to condemn the President if anything went wrong - and the default Democratic position was to defend him.

No one in Congress expected actually to have to make a decision.

To be sure, some members of each party have been outspoken - but they have been outspokenly on both sides of the issue. 

With Syria suddenly at the top of the Congressional agenda, it seems unlikely that either party will be able to work as a unit.  The leaders can't be sure whom they are leading.  The whips can't be sure whipping will work.

Legislative gridlock has been replaced by a strange situation in which everything is in the hotchpot.

Which means that letters, calls and emails from the voters - perhaps even crowds of people in the streets - might actually make the difference here.

Remember what  just happened in Britain.

For the next two weeks, if we want it, the American people will have the chance to decide a matter of real importance through a process approaching actual democracy.

So - what shall we do?

There are, it would appear, four basic options.

First, obviously, Congress could give the President what he is asking for - an endorsement of limited military action against the Syrian government.

Second, it could refuse that endorsement - presumably ending the prospect of American involvement in the Syrian civil war.

Third, it could ask the President for a more detailed plan - perhaps with restrictions to avoid the escalation of an aerial campaign into another full-scale, boots-on-the-ground war.

Finally, Congress could do what almost no one is talking about:  It could declare war on Syria, with the specific intention of ending the Assad regime and confiscating or destroying all of Syria's weapons of mass destruction.

Each of these options has advantages - and all are worthy of discussion.

But the bottom line is this:  The decision as to what we do - or don't do - in Syria is now in our hands.  We can sit back and speculate about what's going on in Washington - or we can demand that our Senators and Representatives listen to us.

Whatever we decide, this should be our decision.  This time - right now - Washington should be listening to us.