By design, Congress is a slow-moving institution. Months, if not years, can go by before legislation moves across the finish line. Issues involving war and peace are no exception to the rule. In fact, as the last 20 years have demonstrated, lawmakers have treated the highly consequential topic of war powers as too difficult or controversial to consider.
Unfortunately, ducking problems doesn’t amount to a solution. When it comes to war powers, avoidance simply widens the already massive disparity in power between the executive and legislative branches. Fortunately, more lawmakers are finally beginning to understand what happens when decades-old authorizations remain on the books.
“Congress, during the time I’ve been here, has been slowly coming to the realization that we have to own more of the process for starting and stopping wars,” Sen. Tim Kaine told Politico this week. A day after that statement was made, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee voted to repeal the 2002 authorization for the use of military force against Iraq.
With the exception of a few lawmakers in both the House and the Senate who have made war powers reform a personal crusade of sorts (Rand Paul, Kaine, Mike Lee, Christopher Murphy, Andy Biggs, and Barbara Lee, to name a few), Congress as an institution has been woefully inadequate on this issue. Part of this stalemate takes root in a genuine disagreement about the extent to which the president can use military force overseas without congressional approval. But an equally, if not larger, part of the problem is an institutional aversion to tinkering with a status quo that has given members of Congress the best of both worlds. That is to say, the ability to complain from the sidelines when a military action goes awry yet avoid any of the responsibility for its undertaking in the first place.
This too-easy convenience has chipped away at the legislative branch’s reputation.
The people expect their elected representatives to debate the important issues and take the tough votes that are a necessary element of the job. There is no more important issue than deciding when the nation goes to war. The constitutional founders felt the same way. No president, regardless of how popular he or she may be with the public, should be able to start a war on his or her own. Recognizing that declaring war is too serious a decision for a lone individual to make, the Constitution provides the legislative branch with the final authority on matters of war and peace. Lawmakers would later reinforce their constitutional prerogatives in 1973 by overriding President Richard Nixon’s veto and passing the War Powers Resolution. Among other stipulations, the resolution states that outside of an attack upon the United States, the president has the obligation to approach Congress for explicit authorization before using force.
But even the War Powers Resolution now looks dead.
Multiple administrations have treated the resolution as an infringement on the president’s constitutional duties as commander in chief. They have simply tossed it aside. The 1983 U.S. invasion of Grenada, the 1989 invasion of Panama, U.S. involvement in peacekeeping operations in Lebanon during the 1980s and Somalia in the 1990s, multiple rounds of U.S. airstrikes in Iraq in the 1990s, U.S. bombing operations in the former Yugoslavia, the list goes on. All of these military operations occurred without congressional authorization. The executive branch’s explanations about why Congress wasn’t needed have also got more absurd. The Obama administration, for instance, went as far as to claim that airstrikes without significant U.S. forces there didn’t constitute war in the traditional sense of the term.
Congress, tired of the executive branch’s expansive interpretations of the Constitution (or perhaps nauseated by its own inactive role over a period of decades), is finally discovering that the system is off-kilter.
If the legislative branch doesn’t begin living up to its constitutional responsibilities, this broken system is only going to get worse.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
