Sen. Tim Kaine isn’t giving up on the push to formally authorize the U.S. war against the Islamic State, even though congressional leaders have no interest in the idea and the Obama administration says it has all the authority it needs.
“We could do this,” he told the Washington Examiner. “We’re going to have to have a hard discussion and trade ideas and have a markup and put in amendments and vote on it.”
The Virginia Democrat is a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, which had a classified briefing on Syria on Tuesday from Brett McGurk, the administration’s coordinator for the international coalition fighting the Islamic State, where the issue came up.
In June, Kaine and Republican Jeff Flake of Arizona teamed up to offer legislation that would authorize U.S. military operations against the Islamic State for three years. But there’s no enthusiasm among congressional leaders to take up the legislation.
“They believe they have the authorities to do what they need to do. I believe they have the authorities to do what they need to do. It is definitely borderline, but I believe they do,” Senate Foreign Relations Chairman Bob Corker, R-Tenn, told the Examiner after the briefing.
“I don’t think that’s an issue that’s going to come up anytime soon, I really don’t. I certainly don’t think it’s an issue anytime soon that’s going to reach enough consensus to actually pass. I prefer not to show that the country may look divided on an issue that we’re not really divided on.”
President Obama sent a draft authorization for the use of force against the Islamic State in February, but neither the House nor the Senate considered it. Republicans opposed it out of concern that Obama’s war policy was too restrained, while many Democrats were leery of giving the president too much power to expand the fight beyond where they were willing to go.
“It’s clear the president does not have a strategy in place, so it would be hard to figure out how to authorize a non-strategy,” Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., said when asked about the issue.
Since then, the White House has let the issue lie, insisting that it has all the legal authority it needs to go after the Islamic State from a 2001 authorization for the use of force against al-Qaeda, since the new extremist threat is seen as a direct successor to the group that conducted the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, along with a 2002 resolution authorizing the deployment of U.S. troops to Iraq.
“There’s always an excuse, but the fact that we don’t like every comma in the president’s version as an excuse for not doing our Article I responsibility is for me just sort of senseless,” Kaine countered.
Pointing to the recent deployment of 50 U.S. special operations troops to Syria, along with the death of another special operator in a raid in Iraq last month, Kaine noted that concerns about a widening war have already proven true, even without congressional authorization.
“It is growing every day — $4.75 billion and rising, 7,000 air campaigns and rising, first combat death,” he said. “More money, more lives lost, more countries, deployment of troops in new ways — and this is just going to continue.”
