President Obama could find it next to impossible to garner congressional approval for military action to combat the Islamic State, a key Democrat said on Sunday.
The president said that he doesn’t believe he needs to seek congressional authorization to target the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. Rep. Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, said he agrees.
But Smith said during an interview with George Stephanopoulos on ABC’s “This Week” that, while he’d prefer that Congress grant Obama that authority anyway, he doesn’t think the president would get the votes.
“It’s hard tell at this point whether the support’s there,” Smith said. “Under Article II [of the U.S. Constitution], the president definitely has the authority to confront a national security threat.”
Smith said potentially irreconcilable differences between members who are hesitant to vote for anything that smacks of another war in the Middle East, and hawks who would worry about limiting the president’s ability to conduct military operations, could ultimately sink any legislation to authorize force against ISIS.
“The devil there is in the details. What does the language look like? What would Congress actually authorize?” Smith said. “I think you’d have a deep divide between people who are worried that it would be too much of a blank check — too broad of authority — and others who might worry that it would constrain the president. So I think getting the exact [nature of] the language through Congress would be extraordinarily difficult even though I agree with [Rep.] Peter [King, R-New York, another ‘This Week’ guest], that’s what we ought to do.”
