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World News See other World News Articles Title: Does Trump need congressional approval to strike Syria? The debate, explained. Does Trump need congressional approval to strike Syria? The debate, explained. It’s often easier, Congress has found, to just let the president do what he wants. By Dara Linddara@vox.com Apr 7, 2017, 2:40pm EDT President Donald Trump with congressional leaders. Nicholas Kamm/AFP via Getty President Trump’s decision to bomb a Syrian airfield in response to a deadly chemical weapons attack has inspired a more bipartisan response from Congress than anything else the president has done in his 11 weeks in office. From House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) to former Democratic vice presidential nominee Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA), from Sen. Rand Paul (R-KY) to Senate Armed Services Committee Chair John McCain (R-AZ), huge swaths of lawmakers from both parties agree: What Syria’s Bashar al-Assad did was terrible, but if Trump wants to commit the US military to doing more to fight him, he ought to go to Congress for approval. He ought to get, they argue, a new Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF): formal endorsement from Congress of the US’s involvement in military “hostilities” against a particular enemy or set of enemies. It remains to be seen, of course, whether the Trump administration will actually listen — the administration hasn’t clearly said whether it plans to take broader military action against Assad, let alone whether it will seek congressional authorization if it does. And if the Trump administration does try to go it alone, it’s unclear whether Congress will care enough to assert its authority over the executive branch. The past 20 years — stretching back even before the “war on terror” began in 2001 — suggest it won’t. It would be perfectly normal for the Trump administration to argue it doesn’t need Congress’s approval to go after Assad. It would court a fight over when and why the executive branch can get America’s military involved in operations overseas without input from Congress — but that fight has been going on for decades. Indeed, the Obama administration made legal arguments for justifiable unilateral force that could be interpreted to validate what Trump did on Thursday night. If Congress really wanted to, it could stop the slow creep of executive war power by forcing Trump to ask, explicitly, for approval to go after Assad. Or it could issue a strong endorsement of an intervention that could turn out to be politically popular. Both of those are things an AUMF can do. But it can’t do both of them at once. Getting Congress to agree on an AUMF will require the members who want to expand presidential war powers, and the members who want to curtail them — a split that doesn’t break evenly along party lines — to come together on a single plan and then put their names to it with a vote. It’s often easier, Congress has found, to just let the executive do what it wants. Why presidents need Congress to authorize military force — at least in theory ”It is a remarkable fact about the US Constitution,” Harvard Law School professor Jack Goldsmith wrote Friday morning at the blog Lawfare, “that 228 years after its creation, we still don’t know what limits, if any, it imposes on unilateral presidential uses of military force.” Article II of the Constitution says that the president is the commander in chief of the armed forces — which means he’s responsible for directing them into battle. But Article I of the Constitution gives Congress, and Congress alone, the authority to declare war — and to appropriate funds to the Defense Department to wage it. Woodrow Wilson asks Congress to declare war on Germany during World War I. Photo12/UIG via Getty There’s no bright line about when something counts as a war that Congress must approve, and when it’s simply a military action the president can direct. (All of this is separate from the question of whether a given military operation is legal under international law — which is also a valid question about Trump’s strikes against Assad.) For most of American history, this wasn’t a problem. ”From 1789 to 1950, Presidents came to Congress either for a declaration of war or statutory authority whenever they decided it was necessary to take the country from a state of peace to a state of war,” Constitution Project scholar Louis Fisher told Ryan Goodman of the law blog Just Security on Thursday night. “In doing so, they complied with the Framers’ clear intent that the decision to use offensive force against another country must reside solely in Congress,” he said. President Harry Truman broke that precedent. While we call the Korean War a “war” today, Truman never bothered to get a declaration of war from Congress — he just sent US troops to aid American-aligned South Korea against communist North Korea on his own. That set a Cold War precedent. The Johnson administration got congressional approval (via the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin resolution) to escalate the war in Vietnam; the resolution was repealed in 1971, at which point the war it had written a “blank check” for had killed tens of thousands of American soldiers. By the time Congress discovered that Nixon had conducted a secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, they got sufficiently fed up. Too little, too late. CORBIS via Getty In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Act, an attempt to clarify where the executive’s “commander in chief” powers ended and Congress’ “declare war” power began. The War Powers Act required the president to notify Congress when he got the US involved in “hostilities” — and then set a 60- to 90-day clock for Congress to approve that action, by passing an authorization of use of military force, or for the president to withdraw from the conflict. It also allowed Congress to pass a concurrent resolution that would force the executive branch to withdraw from any conflict it hasn’t already approved. But the War Powers Act didn’t resolve the debate. It just shifted it — from what counted as a “war” to what counted as “hostilities.” Some hawks (including some presidential administrations) have argued that the War Powers Act is itself unconstitutional, because being commander in chief gives the president unlimited authority to carry out military action. More often, though, presidents have just skirted the issue. The only president to officially file a report that triggered the 60- to 90-day clock, according to the Library of Congress, was Gerald Ford. President Reagan went into Lebanon while telling Congress but without formally reporting on it, and into El Salvador without notifying Congress at all; President Bush argued that he didn’t need congressional approval to go into Kuwait, because the US was acting in support of a United Nations resolution. President Clinton told Congress when he went into Bosnia and Kosovo but never triggered the 60-day countdown — and while some members of Congress were upset by the move, it wasn’t enough to pass a resolution forcing the president to withdraw. Then 9/11 happened — changing the debate from “when can a president take action without authorization?” to “just how far does one authorization stretch?” 2001: one AUMF, more than three dozen military actions Post Comment Private Reply Ignore Thread
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