Congress ceding role, Moseley Braun says
Congress should have opposed the resolution authorizing military action in Iraq not only on policy grounds, but more fundamentally because it continued a post-World War II erosion of its constitutional authority to declare war, presidential contender Carol Moseley Braun said yesterday.
"We keep having these `actions,' but frankly the overlooking of that constitutional imperative, that's how we got to a preemption doctrine," the former Illinois senator and current candidate for the Democratic nomination said during an hourlong interview with Globe reporters and editors.
Moseley Braun said she would have not only voted against the resolution last year, but also against a recent $87 billion spending request for the Iraqi occupation. She said the resolution, as well as fast-track authority that allows a president to negotiate trade agreements that Congress cannot amend, amounts to an abdication of responsibility by members of the House and Senate.
"I just think that the further away we get from the kind of balance that the Constitution called for, the more likely it is that we'll find ourselves in quagmires like Iraq and like Vietnam," she said.
Moseley Braun was the first black woman elected to the US Senate, in 1992. She was defeated for reelection and left office under an ethics cloud after being criticized for visiting Nigeria in 1996 while it was under the control of a brutal dictator, Sani Abacha, and after the Federal Election Commission launched an investigation of her use of campaign funds.
The commission ultimately did not find any wrongdoing, and yesterday the former senator said the sole purpose of her visit was to attend the funeral of Abacha's son.
"I didn't really know the father; I had met him twice. And was he a brutal dictator? Yeah, but that's all Nigeria had until recently, was brutal dictators," Moseley Braun said.
The interview occurred on the same day Moseley Braun announced she had hired a new campaign manager, Patricia Ireland, the former president of the National Organization for Women.
Last Friday, the campaign lost two top advisers -- Kevin Lampe and Kitty Kurth -- and campaign treasurer Billie Paige planned to quit yesterday as well, Paula Xanthopoulou, manager of the campaign's Chicago operations, told the Associated Press. In addition, Braun has struggled to raise money, collecting $342,519 through Sept. 30. Her campaign had $29,278 in cash on hand.
Mosely Braun said last night at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where she appeared on MSNBC's "Hardball," that she has no plans to drop out of the race.
"We're in it to win it," she said repeatedly. "We're going to stay in it through the convention."
In the earlier interview, Moseley Braun described Ireland as "a guerrilla warrior" who will help her with fund-raising and publicity. While she polled at 0 percent in a New Hampshire public opinion survey released last week, Moseley Braun said that she tied Senator John F. Kerry in the most recent national poll for Newsweek, and said she was beating Senator John Edwards "in every poll that's ever been taken anywhere in this country."
Glen Johnson can be reached at johnson@globe.com. 
