Senate lawmakers might hold a public hearing on new legislation outlining the president’s war-making authority against terrorist groups, following a Tuesday discussion in the Foreign Relations Committee.
“Let me see if I can get an administration official up here on Wednesday and we’ll see what we can do,” Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn., said Tuesday morning.
That was a concession to a request from New Jersey Sen. Bob Menendez, the top Democrat on the panel, who wants a full hearing on the newly-unveiled proposal to give President Trump the explicit legal authority to fight the Islamic State and other terrorist groups. Corker, who led a bipartisan group of lawmakers in drafting that new authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, preferred a private meeting to discuss the merits of the text.
“We got the final version last night and it seems to me that the full implications and details of the text should be publicly vetted before a vote, [so] that the Congress is not creating unintended consequences or ways the AUMF could be misused in the future,” Menendez said.
Initially, Corker thought the request was “a stall tactic,” especially given that the committee has had four hearings in the past year featuring broad discussion of what an AUMF should say.
“Those hearings created the body of work that we now have,” he said. “We’ve hearing’d this thing to death. The hearings are what developed the sort of principles that caused us to come to this bipartisan agreement.”
Instead of a hearing, he wanted a closed-door meeting with the entire committee and their staff to discuss the finer points of the long-awaited bill, which was co-authored by Tim Kaine, the Virginia senator and 2016 Democratic vice presidential nominee. “I’m glad to spend however many hours people want to spend on Wednesday walking through [the text] in a closed session,” Corker said.
Menendez insisted on the hearing. “I think this is a momentous vote and I think it needs the appropriate attention,” he said. “It’d be very good to have an administration witness and, from my perspective, I believe most of it can be done in the public … And secondly, I would urge you to consider some analysis outside of the administration of the specific text. All of it could be done at the same time and I think that would be a good way to move forward.”
