When George W. Bush recently said that the United States would come to the defense of Taiwan if the island nation were invaded by the People’s Republic of China, the ensuing firestorm in the media centered around whether or not such a guarantee was wise from a foreign policy standpoint. Myles Kantor is the only other person I’ve run across who noticed that Bush lacks the Constitutional authority to make such a promise.
Apparently Article I, Section 8 of the U.S. Constitution has now officially joined the Second and Second, Ninth, and Tenth Amendments as being no longer in force, despite the lack of their repeal through the processes called for in Article 5.