Depends on who your definition of President is...

Glenn Greenwald has an instructive post on how the Not Democratic Party, a/k/a Repubilcans, felt about the president's mandate to take military action without the permission of Congress when it was Not Bush, a/k/a Clinton, who held the office. And that totally false legend the wrongwingnuts invented and spread around the uninformed that it's Clinton's fault we left Somalia the first time? Glenn knocks that down like a kewpie doll at the carnival.

There's so many delicious quotes, it's hard to choose. Circa 1993.

John McCain: What is the criteria and what should be the criteria is our immediate, orderly withdrawal from Somalia. And if we do not do that and other Americans die, other Americans are wounded, other Americans are captured because we stay too long--longer than necessary--then I would say that the responsibilities for that lie with the Congress of the United States who did not exercise their authority under the Constitution of the United States and mandate that they be brought home quickly and safely as possible. . . .

Jesse Helms - As a matter of fact, while we are at it, it is high time we reviewed the War Powers Act, which, in the judgment of this Senator, should never have been passed in the first place. The sole constitutional authority to declare war rests, according to our Founding Fathers, right here in the Congress of the United States, and not on Pennsylvania Avenue.

Alan Simpson : What I cannot continue to support is the continuing endangerment of Americans in the service of a policy that remains absolutely mysterious and totally muddled.

I thought they were right about that at the time. No president should be allowed to wage war without consent of the people. I didn't want us in Somalia. I didn't want us in Bosnia. I wasn't too keen on Reagan invading Grenada either, but at least he picked an easy symbolic target in response to the terrorist attack on his watch.

All I can say is the GOPers picked a hell of bad time to cancel their convictions on Congressional authority in order to play the royal pages to a virtual monarchy theory.