JeffEngel wrote:The Eridani Edict was established as a specific, exceptional response to a specific, known, painfully familiar problem. They made that exception to the League's gridlock-near-guaranteed voting system specifically to make sure the EE had teeth, and they bothered because they'd had a horrible history of genocidal bombardments. And even then, they had a very specific set of conditions for what would trigger it - not just any WMD that landed on an inhabited planet - and a specific response: ending the particular chain of command responsible for that act.
Given all that as background, I don't believe it would stand to reason that they'd have another article providing for war against alien aggressors. How to frame it with comparable specificity would crop up if you take the EE as a precedent; how to respond would be another. Humanity was already rather ashamed of how it'd dealt with some other alien civilizations - guaranteeing the possibility of unleashing the Solarian League on them without a vote or discussion would be a standing blot on humanity's cred with aliens. It'd cast a shadow over the League's standing as the hero of humankind, and wouldn't be something to fade into obscurity that readily. (Compare the U.S. Constitution's provision of 3/5ths of a person status for representation and taxation for slaves.)
Furthermore, the Mandarins can't much afford to draw attention to little-known clauses of the Constitution as dubious sources of authority to do an end-run around the Constitution otherwise. Their entire position relies on treating the written Constitution as a mere historical curiosity with little or no current bearing.
Fair enough. Even if no such clause exists in the Solarian Constitution it does beg the question of how Ed and Info could use the fact that the SEM has two alien species among its ranks to fuel the propaganda war.