Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) took to the Senate floor Thursday morning to bemoan the lack of an authorization to use military force again ISIL, the extremist militant group also known as ISIS, the Islamic State and Daesh. After nine months of "executive war," Kaine said, Congress still "lacks the backbone to do the job it is supposed to do." Its silence in the matter is "shameful." "We should have done this months ago."
Although the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed a draft AUMF in mid-December as the 113th Congress wrapped up its business before the holidays, it never got a floor debate. There has been no action in the House or even a hearing in any House committee.
President Obama began ordering air strikes against the ISIL militants in August. The authority for this, he said, is the 2001 AUMF passed in the wake of the 9/11 attacks by Al Qaeda. In fact, that AUMF has been used as cover by both President George Bush and Obama to attack pretty much wherever they decided.
But Kaine said Thursday that using the 14-year-old AUMF in this way is to pretend it is a blank check allowing the president to fight terrorists anywhere. That, he said, was explicitly not approved by Congress. ISIL is not Al Qaeda, he said, but rather its enemy. "The president does not have the legal power to maintain this war without Congress."
The president sent a proposed ISIL AUMF to the Senate in February. It is designed to permit attacks against a wide range of targets, contains no real curb over the use of combat troops, would not repeal the 2001 AUMF that has been used to take military action pretty much anywhere the Bush and Obama administrations have chosen. It would, in fact, guarantee more years of perpetual war.
There is more below the fold.
Jennifer Bendery reports:
Since then, lawmakers' complaints about not getting a war authorization request have morphed into complaints about not liking the one they got. Democrats think it's too broad, and Republicans say it's too restrictive. Any member of Congress can propose amendments to it, but nobody has figured out how to change it in a way that both parties can agree to. So, the AUMF has not moved and the war has carried on without any parameters on its duration, costs or endgame. As of Wednesday, the U.S. has spent more than $2.1 billion, participated in 3,713 airstrikes and sent roughly 3,000 military personnel to Iraq. [...]
Tim Kaine Thursday morning.
For the moment, the AUMF's prospects aren't looking good. Most lawmakers aren't even talking about it, and the questions most commonly heard from Capitol Hill reporters are about whether it's officially dead. But Kaine said he still thinks Congress can get it done, despite the lack of momentum, because the vast majority of lawmakers believe they should be involved in shaping military action against the Islamic State.
Congress ought to reject the ISIL AUMF in its current form and repeal not just the 2002 Iraq AUMF as Obama's proposal would do, but dump the 14-year-old "war on terror" AUMF as well. ISIL wouldn't exist at all if terrible foreign policy decisions had not been made under cover the 2001 AUMF and the 2002 Iraq AUMF. And now the nation is deep in the quagmire, placing itself in contradictory, if temporary, alliances against ISIL with groups that have declared the U.S. their enemy.
Some critics on the left have argued with considerable good sense that Congress shouldn't be approving any new AUMFs. If the fight is worth having, they say—and many don't believe it is—then Congress should declare war as the Constitution empowers it to do. But no Congress has declared war since December 8, 1941. And there is the fact that ISIL is not a nation-state like the foes the Founders were talking about when they gave Congress its war-authorizing power more than two centuries ago.
But the president clearly intends to keep using the authority he argues gives him the go-ahead for extended action against ISIL. Short of a popular uprising from below, an AUMF seems the only practical way to at least try to constrain the administration. Thus, in the unlikely event that Kaine gets his way and there is a debate leading up to a vote on an AUMF, those in Congress, with the backbone the Virginia senator decries is lacking, should demand an authorization with the tightest and narrowest possible focus and, at the longest, a one-year expiration date.