Senator Clinton struck a bipartisan note yesterday in her comments on the Senate floor concerning Iran, but perhaps not in exactly the way she wished. “Whatever steps, if any, may be required should be taken by our nation, not just by our President. We must act as Americans, not as members of one party or another,” Mrs. Clinton said. “If the Administration believes that any, any use of force against Iran is necessary, the President must come to Congress to seek that authority,” Mrs. Clinton said, insisting that neither the 2002 resolution authorizing force against Iraq nor the 2001 resolution authorizing force after the terrorist attacks of September 11 provided the authority.

As a legal and Constitutional matter, Mrs. Clinton is incorrect. Mr. Bush has the authority — not only under the 2001 and 2002 resolutions but simply by virtue of his constitutional power as commander in chief — to use force against Iran without prior Congressional authorization. Congress would have the power, under the Constitution, eventually to cut off war spending, but the president does not need a permission slip to use the military.

As a political and practical matter, however, it would be a better thing for America, if overt military action is eventually needed against Iran, for it it to come after a declaration of war passed by the Congress after a public campaign of persuasion by Mr. Bush. But in insisting a president lacks the power to use the military without express congressional authorization, Mrs. Clinton is joining with Congressional critics who used the years that her husband was in power to nip legalistically at his heels every time he let fly a Tomahawk. The split here isn’t between Republicans and Democrats so much as between the president and Congress; as a 2004 issue brief by the Congressional Research Service noted, since Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution in 1973 over President Nixon’s veto, “every president” — every president — “has taken the position that it is an unconstitutional infringement by the Congress on the president’s authority as the commander in chief.”

President Clinton sent 20,000 American combat troops to Bosnia in 1995 and 8,500 troops to Bosnia in 1996 without congressional authorization. He sent 21,000 troops to Haiti in 1994 without Congressional authorization, for which he was hassled by Senator Robert Dole. Mr. Clinton launched an air campaign in Kosovo in 1999, also without Congressional authorization. Some 14 Congressmen sued in federal court to to stop the action, arguing it hadn’t been authorized by Congress. The list of Congressmen who sued was certainly bipartisan — from Dennis Kucinich and Marcy Kaptur on the hard left to Thomas Tancredo, Robert Barr, Daniel Burton, and Ron Paul on the hard right. But Mrs. Clinton may want to ask herself if this is the sort of bipartisan position with which she really wants to be associated.

It would be understandable in a woman whose ambitions did not extend beyond rising to, say, Senate majority leader. But for a woman who aspires to the White House to stand on the Senate floor and lay down markers about how a president in the midst of a vast global struggle against Islamic extremist terrorism is going to need to check with Congress for a go-ahead between every battle — well, it just strikes us as un-presidential. If Mrs. Clinton wins the White House, She will come to regret the remarks she made yesterday, because they will be thrown back at her by some carping legislators when the time comes to act swiftly and perhaps even secretly to defend Americans.