Senators McCain and Kerry have probably made moot (at least for now) the War Powers threat that has been fitfully gathering steam in the House. And that’s probably fine, as a War Powers showdown is a low-payoff proposition between now and November 2012. It is correct to worry about Obama’s non-hostile kinetic military action in Libya being mishandled and problematic, but the War Powers Act is a bad tool that would make things worse, not better.

In its own way, the War Powers Act is part of the same problem posed by the NHKMA in Libya: it tries to denature and bureaucratize war. The principal reason it is bad law derives from the fact that it is unenforceable – and ultimately unnecessary – on its own terms. To enforce the War Powers Act when a president refuses to comply with it, Congress must do what the Constitution already empowered it to do, before the War Powers Act was ever thought of: deny funds to the president’s military operations.