Measure to curb war powers of president gains House OK
WASHINGTON — The House voted Thursday for a proposal to revoke the authorization it gave in 2002 to invade Iraq, a step that would rein in presidential war-making powers for the first time in a generation.
The bipartisan action reflected growing determination on Capitol Hill to revisit the broad authority that Congress provided to then-President George W. Bush after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The 2002 authorization was repeatedly applied well beyond its original intent, including in a campaign much later against the Islamic State militant group in Iraq and for the killing of Iranian Gen. Qasem Soleimani last year.
The vote was 268-161, with 49 Republicans joining 219 Democrats in favor of the bill.
Supporters said repeal would not affect U.S. military operations around the world, but could prevent a president from relying on the 2002 authorization to conduct un
related military actions. The White House says there are no ongoing military activities reliant solely upon that authorization.
Rep. Barbara Lee. D-Calif., the bill’s sponsor, said 87% of the current members of the House were not in Congress in 2002 and that the authorization for military force passed at that time bears no correlation to the threats the nation faces today. She also was the lone vote against the 2001 authorization after the 9/11 attacks.
“To this day, our endless war continues costing trillions of dollars and thousands of lives in a war that goes way beyond any scope that Congress conceived, or intended,” Lee said.
Still, many lawmakers — most of them Republicans — have rejected the idea of winding down the existing authorizations for the use of military force without having replacements prepared to address “the modern-day threat.”
“We need to replace this with an updated [authorization] that reflects the threats in the region, the current threats, which is Iran,” Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the ranking Republican on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said on the floor just before the vote.
But Democrats rejected his argument.
“If we think Iran is a threat, maybe we should do an AUMF for Iran. … This AUMF is for Iraq,” said House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Gregory Meeks, D-N.Y.. “There’s no need to repeal and replace; they’re outdated, and once they’re outdated, let’s just remove them from the books.”
Majority Leader Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., said Wednesday that he would put a similar measure on the Senate floor.
President Joe Biden said this week that he would sign the House measure, making him the first president to accept such an effort to constrain his authority to carry out military action since the war in Afghanistan began 20 years ago.
Lawmakers have been trying for almost a decade to repeal both the 2002 authorization for the use of military force as well as the 2001 authorization that Congress passed to greenlight hostilities against the perpetrators of the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks.
The White House said Biden is committed to working with Congress to update the authorization with a “narrow and specific framework appropriate to ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats.”
Schumer said he wanted to be clear that legislation terminating the use of force in Iraq does not mean the U.S. is abandoning the country and the shared fight against the Islamic State group. He said the measure would eliminate the possibility of a future administration “reaching back into the legal dustbin to use it as a justification for military adventurism.”
Congress, however, is still largely divided along party lines about whether the move to repeal such authorizations will actually allow lawmakers to reclaim their power to permit the use of military force — a decision that some think has been usurped by successive presidents.
Over many decades, Congress has effectively ceded much of its power to declare war to the presidency, leaving some lawmakers in both parties uneasy.
Even if the Senate joins the House in repealing the 2002 authorization, Congress would still leave in place a much broader authorization, passed three days after the 9/11 attacks, on approving the use of force against al-Qaida and the Taliban. Successive presidents have cited the 2001 authorization to justify operations against “associated forces,” and critics say it has given presidents excessive latitude to wage “forever wars” without further congressional approval in the Middle East and beyond.
“We want to keep the 2001 one,” said Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma, the highest-ranking Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee. If the 2001 authorization is maintained, Inhofe said, “then the 2002 one would be expendable.”
“We used it to get Soleimani, and there might be another Soleimani out there,” Inhofe said.
Unlike declarations of a major conflict like World War II, authorizations for use of force are typically intended for limited use for a specific mission or region, such as Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan.
AFGHAN PULLOUT
Debate over the repeal of war powers takes place as the U.S. continues to withdraw the last of its troops from Afghanistan after 20 years of warfare in the country.
Pentagon leaders, who have been wary of the withdrawal, said Thursday that an extremist group like al-Qaida may be able to regenerate in Afghanistan and pose a threat to the U.S. homeland within two years of the American military’s withdrawal from the country.
It was the most specific public forecast of the prospects for a renewed international terrorist threat from Afghanistan since Biden announced in April that all U.S. troops would withdraw by Sept. 11.
At a Senate Appropriations Committee hearing, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said he rated the likelihood of this sort of regeneration as “medium,” adding that “it would take possibly two years for them to develop that capability.”
Gen. Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and a veteran of the war in Afghanistan, said he agreed.
“I think that if certain other things happen — if there was a collapse of the government or the dissolution of the Afghan security forces — that risk would obviously increase, but right now I would say ‘medium’ and about two years or so,” Milley said.
Their responses underscored the overall military fears about the consequences of a complete, unconditional withdrawal. Military leaders over the past few years have pushed back against administration efforts — including at times by then-President Donald Trump — to pull out of Afghanistan by a certain date, rather than basing troop numbers on the security conditions on the ground.
Milley also acknowledged that a collapse of the government or takeover by the Taliban could have broader impacts on the strides women have made in Afghanistan. And the military has said it will be far more difficult to collect intelligence on terror groups in the country, if there is no American presence there.
The Biden administration has acknowledged that a full U.S. troop withdrawal is not without risks, but argued that waiting for a better time to end U.S. involvement in the war is a recipe for never leaving, while extremist threats fester elsewhere.
“We cannot continue the cycle of extending or expanding our military presence in Afghanistan, hoping to create ideal conditions for the withdrawal, and expecting a different result,” Biden said, when announcing the withdrawal plan in April. He added, “It’s time to end America’s longest war.”
The White House said Biden is committed to working with Congress to update the authorization with a “narrow and specific framework appropriate to ensure that we can continue to protect Americans from terrorist threats.”
Information for this article was contributed by Jennifer Steinhauer of The New York Times; by Karoun Demirjian of The Washington Post; and by Kevin Freking, Bill Barrow, Robert Burns, and Lolita Baldor of The Associated Press.