Congress left behind, again
Did the president need Congress’ permission to bomb Syria? At least one relevant person thinks so: the president.
“What will we get for bombing Syria besides more debt and a possible long term conflict?” citizen Donald Trump tweeted in 2013, when President Barack Obama was considering military strikes against Bashar Assad’s forces after they killed hundreds of civilians with nerve gas. “Obama needs congressional approval.”
Once in office, though, President Trump followed Obama — and previous presidents dating at least to Harry Truman — toward ever more unilateral and unlimited presidential power to make war. However morally justifiable Trump’s bombardment of Syria was as a response to Assad’s latest chemically assisted slaughter of his own people, it had the flimsiest legal basis for a military attack on another country yet advanced by a U.S. president.
In a report to lawmakers required by the War Powers Resolution — Congress’ failed Nixon-era attempt to reassert its constitutional authority over military action — Trump asserted that he had “acted in the vital national security and foreign policy interests of the United States, pursuant to my constitutional authority to conduct foreign relations and as Commander in Chief and Chief Executive.” The vital national interests cited are in deterring chemical attacks and promoting “the stability of the region,” broad goals that place scant limits on presidential use of force. Indeed, the president’s report vaguely threatens “additional action, as necessary and appropriate.”
“When did we beat Japan at anything?” Trump famously asked while running for office. The answer, as it happens, is also the last time Congress formally exercised its constitutional power to declare war. After World War II, Truman signaled the beginning of the end of Congress’ role by deriving authority to send American forces to Korea from a U.N. Security Council resolution. Presidents have since reached for an array of justifications in U.S. and international law to extend their authority to conduct warfare, which is rooted in the Constitution’s designation of the president as commander in chief of the armed forces.
The wars in Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan all had congressional authorization short of declarations of war. Such resolutions have often failed to serve as the check on the president that the founders intended. As Rep. Barbara Lee of Oakland noted in The Chronicle this week, the loosely worded post-9/11 authorization of force has been commandeered as cover for no fewer than 37 actions, including the campaign against Islamic State extremists in Iraq and Syria a decade and a half later.
Lacking even such tenuous congressional permission, presidents have cited other sources of authority. President Ronald Reagan argued that his invasion of Grenada was necessary to protect Americans on the island and requested by other Caribbean nations. President Bill Clinton claimed international legitimacy through NATO to deploy forces in Kosovo, as Obama later did in Libya — while also positing that an air war is somehow not a war.
Trump so far has not even pretended to have international support or a need to protect Americans, much less acknowledged a role for Congress. Obama considered a similarly unilateral response to Assad’s earlier chemical attack (despite then-citizen Trump’s critique), insisting he did not need congressional dispensation — though he eventually sought it before abandoning a military response altogether. Along with Congress, which often has been complicit in its marginalization, Obama and other presidents thereby laid the foundation for Trump to declare all but unchecked power over the nation’s weightiest decisions.