Taking off on just one observation made above:

... the whole [AP article] reads as if the idea of Congressional approval is some late-breaking, innovative extension of the "power of the purse."

From the Baker/Christopher New York Times Op-Ed piece in question:

... If the resolution of disapproval did not survive the president’s veto, Congress could express its opposition by, for example, using its internal rules to block future spending on the conflict.

So, yes, as Baker and Christopher rather lamely admit in passing, at the heart of every argument ever made in America against (or in favor of) the abuse of standing armies by the Presidential Executive, the "power of the purse" -- as designed by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, et al -- provides the only true and real "war powers act" that America requires. America's disastrous War on Southeast Asia (Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) only ended when the American Congress refused to pay for any more of the (then-current) president's disastrous militarism. The so-called "War Powers Act" has had little real effect on Presidential war-making, either decades ago or -- obviously -- recently. Only the desired funding, or its necessary absence, matters.

"Money talks and bullshit walks," goes a saying in the vulgar vernacular; and former Secretaries of State James Baker and Warren Christopher could have saved themselves and their put-upon readers much wasted time and deconstructive effort by simply repeating what the jaded Vietnamese bar girls used to jeer at broke and hard-up GIs on Saigon's Tu Do Street over three decades ago: "No money, no honey!" True war-powers do not find any simpler or more effective expression than that.

Of course, presidential fetishists like Baker and Christopher give away the entire point of their article by limiting Congress only to "expressing" its collective opinion instead of "enforcing" the people's will upon an outlaw Presidential Executive and his military-industrial Praetorian Guard. Therein lies the rub. Does the President require the people's publicly promulgated "permission" to launch ruinous war in the country's name, or should he only seek mealy-mouthed "forgiveness" (and endless "emergency" appropriations) afterwards for whatever crimes he has perpetrated in arrogating to himself a dangerous power that only the people collectively possess?

The Constitution provides -- for good and numerous reasons -- that all spending bills must originate in the people's House of Representatives. Speaker Nancy Pelosi has apparently never heard of this fundamental concept, but if no spending bill originates in the House, then the Senate has no spending bill to filibuster; the president has no spending bill to veto; and the courts have no law upon which to rule one way or another. The ancient Chinese called this formidable passive resistance "Wu-Wei," which means that "by doing nothing, all necessary things get done." Baker and Christopher seem to find it abhorent that the Founders of our Constitutional Republic would have understood this principle utterly and thus made needless war (and the standing armies that make them inevitable) difficult to start and maintain but easy to prevent or stop -- just by never proposing a spending bill in the House to pay for any part of the ruinous nonsense.

Again and again and again and again: the Founders of our Constitutional Republic wanted to make war hard and peace easy. Baker and Christopher simply don't get this. They think just the opposite: namely, that we the people should make war-agitating presidential adventurism easy on the presidential adventurer by coughing up any and all vast amounts of blood and national treasure that he demands for no reason other than that he demands obediance to his "will."

The corrupt presidential courtiers Baker and Christopher miss the entire point of the Constitution's checks and balances if they suppose that divided power only suggests some sort of amorphous collegial "consultation" between co-operating government branches instead of a self-interested death-grip upon each institution's respective special prerogatives. Given their profound ignorance of the Constitution as prime protector of the people's freedom from government tyranny, it would seem only the most modest of proposals to insist that these two deluded dinosaurs refrain from further pontificating upon the need for more "parchment provisions," as Hamiltion disdainfully called needless ineffective new laws designed to replace needless ineffective old laws that our own government has no intention of obeying. "What," Hamilton pointedly asked in Federalist No. 26, "is the use of such a provision if it cease to operate the moment there is an inclination to disregard it?" As Baker and Christopher themselves admit, every president since Richard Nixon (what a ridiculous baseline standard of comparison!) has disregarded -- i.e., violated -- laws (passed over ineffective presidential vetos) seeking to restrict, through statute, unconstitutional presidential war-making. So why advocate more admittedly ineffective legislation instead of insisting on compliance with already existing law?

Presidential disregard of laws we already have constitutes our clear and present danger today. Proposing more ex-post-facto "laws" to either forgive past law-breaking (the Congress pardoning the President and telecommications executives!) or proposing new "laws" (i.e., "suggestions") for the president and corporations to disregard in the future will not help, to say the least. We need no new broken laws to encourage further lawbreaking by our own government. We only need no new money for military madness. Simply by the House of Representatives doing nothing (which the majority-party Speaker can ensure to her everlasting fame), all things necessary to end the needless and illegal occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan will get done. That won't solve all of America's manifest and pressing problems, but it will solve two of the worst ones and free up scarce resources for necessary domestic renewal.

"Money talks and bullshit walks." "No money, no honey!" The power of the purse does indeed provide the only true war-powers restraint upon military adventurism by an arrogant and out-of-control Presidential Executive. Even Baker and Christopher admit this bottom-line truth -- without apparently realizing that it eviscerates their entire, pro-presidential "argument." When the House of Representatives simply does nothing about funding needless and ruinous war, then everything necessary to end our two Vietnams in the Middle East will get done. The Founders of our Republic easily foresaw our present predicament and tried to provide us with the means to prevent or curtail it. We need no other "war powers" than the one they originally bequeathed to us. We need only realize the wisdom of doing nothing when an out-of-control, lawless Presidential Executive starts screaming about "danger" and his need to rob us of our freedoms and money because only by enslaving us to endless militarism can he assure our "safety."

As former (pre-Nixon) President Dwight Eisenhower used to wisely exhort frenetic meddlers: "Don't just do something! Stand there!" Baker and Christopher want us to "do" something we don't need to do -- again. I claim we just need to ignore their pious proposals and concentrate on doing absolutely nothing to fund further imperial military adventurism. In that way, what most needs doing will get done. "Wu-Wei."