Is the 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Force, the 18-year-old war powers resolution that has been twisted into an unrecognizable pretzel by three different administrations, on its deathbed? This question may be premature at the moment, but the House Appropriations Committee is doing its level best to eliminate a law that has provided presidents of both parties with a virtual blank check on when and where to deploy U.S. military power.
On Tuesday, the committee voted in support of an amendment that would sunset the 2001 resolution eight months after final passage of the new defense spending bill. The panel also included a provision sunsetting the 2002 Iraq War resolution and an additional section prohibiting President Trump from using funds to take military action against Iran without the express authorization of Congress. In an ideal world, the executive branch wouldn’t spend a second deceiving itself about the constitutionality of such a scenario unless U.S. national security interests were at imminent risk of attack. Unfortunately, this isn’t the world we live in.
To its credit, this isn’t the first time lawmakers in the House have attempted to kill the nearly two-decade-old AUMF. In 2017, the GOP-controlled House Appropriations Committee added a similar amendment to its own defense spending bill. Last year, the full Democratic-held House went so far as to repeal the AUMF in its draft of a government funding bill.
It’s not that Congress as an institution is uninterested in taking a good, hard look at the law or reclaiming some of its war-making power. The problem, rather, is that some lawmakers have been perfectly willing to throw themselves on the train tracks to safeguard what has essentially become an imperial presidency. Indeed, whenever AUMF reform is put on the table for discussion, congressional leadership uses all the tools at its disposal to quickly take it off.
In 2017, the House Rules Committee took less than a month to overrule the appropriations committee’s work. At the urging of then-House Speaker Paul Ryan’s office, the AUMF sunset was stripped from the funding bill due to complaints about committee jurisdiction — perhaps the lamest, least creative excuse one could offer. The 2019 effort was nixed during the conference committee negotiations, when Senate Republicans fought tooth and nail to ensure the AUMF was alive and kicking after the government’s trillion-dollar spending legislation was passed into law (the effort worked). And last December, when the House and Senate sat down to settle differences on the 2020 National Defense Authorization Act, repealing the 2001 resolution was nowhere to be found. The White House made sure the amendment died a painful death.
Why the reservation? Opponents of repealing the AUMF typically make the same argument: It’s blatantly irresponsible, and in fact unpatriotic, to pull the rug out from under U.S. troops in the field and put them in the position of fighting al Qaeda and its affiliates without clear legal authority. Others make the point that it’s reckless to eliminate the AUMF without a replacement ready to go, conveniently ignoring the reality that all of these reform efforts give lawmakers an extra eight months to negotiate a new war powers resolution before the statute disappears.
Still others present the ridiculous claim that reasserting Congress’s constitutional prerogatives on war and peace is somehow a violation of the Constitution and a direct infringement on the president’s authority to take the United States to war. The founding document, of course, says no such thing.
For those of us who have long seen the power disparity between the executive and legislative branches as a significant danger to the checks and balances underlying our system of government, the House Appropriations Committee’s actions are a step in the right direction. Those on the panel who voted to push the provision through deserve a resounding applause.
Yet like most consequential pieces of legislation nowadays, whether AUMF reform survives will depend on the whims of congressional leadership. If these self-professed supporters of the Constitution truly seek to put their money where their mouths are, they should stop giving the president extreme deference on war and peace and start becoming a part of the conversation.
Daniel DePetris (@DanDePetris) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. His opinions are his own.
