Limbo on Libya

On Friday, as reported by the AP, the House overwhelmingly defeated, 295 to 123, a bill to authorize the Libya intervention for one year. But it also defeated, by a vote of 238 to 180, a measure that “would have barred drone attacks and airstrikes but allowed the United States to continue actions in support of the NATO-led operation such as intelligence gathering, refueling and reconnaissance.” The Republican leadership backed the measure but, tellingly, did not pressure Republican members to vote for it.

So it looks as though we’re in a (un)constitutional limbo, in which the Congress will neither authorize the intervention nor stop it. Which supports my previously stated fears that Speaker Boehner and the Republican leadership are only going through the motions of stopping Obama’s illegal war, not taking the actual steps needed to stop it.

To be more precise, the Republican leadership are not in the Limbo of Dante’s Inferno, where reside the virtuous pagans who died before the advent of Christ, but rather in Hell’s Vestibule, where, as John Ciardi describes it, there are punished

those outcasts who took no sides in the Rebellion of the Angels. They are neither in Hell nor out of it. Eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs ever before them through the dirty air…

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 26, 2011 04:10 PM | Send