>>2462212Libertarians here in the U.S. are Constitution fetishists. They love the Constitution as it was written at the time of the founding. This is an important reason why they don't like the "imperial presidency" and the president ordering the military to drop bombs on people. They have a reading of the Constitution that the power to declare war is up to Congress (which is true according to the text). They are basically deeply skeptical of the executive branch of the U.S. federal government.
The problem with this is that the Constitution is really anachronistic given 21st-century conditions.
It was designed from the get-go to make it difficult to change laws in the interest of the majority. There's a separation of powers (including between the House and Senate) and the upper house (the Senate) is flatly undemocratic as an institution, so legislation that might be popular with the majority of Americans can be derailed by a single senator from Idaho even though California has 20x the population of Idaho. The reason for this is because the Constitution was written by white male property holders who did not like democracy or the idea of majority rule. The libertarians believe that's awesome and the way it should be. But as the modern state developed with its large administrative bureaucracy, the president (as the chief of the executive branch) ended up taking on a lot of powers to act unilaterally because Congress became incapable of doing that, because it was designed to handle things in a country of yeoman farmers and slave owners in the 18th century.
So, libertarians complain about the president taking on these powers, yet the Constitution also didn't provide them any way to stop the president, who does have considerable power (which is also vague and he's the "commander in chief" of the armed forces) unless Congress reasserted itself… which it's not doing. And then again, the libertarians might not like the consquences of Congress of doing that either, because if we had a more democratic system in which Congress (as the best body representing all Americans) asserts its power, you'd have effectively made Nancy Pelosi the prime minister of the United States a few years ago with a majority in the House. Then they'd pass legislation tightening up restrictions on gun ownership (which most Americans support in some kind of way), but Massie doesn't support that.