DEBATE UNDERWAY on strike’s legality.
To hear some members of Congress tell it, President Donald Trump’s sudden and direct attack on the Syrian government Thursday night was illegal. Congress, after all, is the only branch of government that can authorize war.
Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., tweeted:
“Assad is a brutal dictator who must be held account for atrocities. But the president’s failure to seek congressional approval is unlawful”
But foreign-policy experts say Trump is probably OK launching one or even a couple series of strikes on his own without Congress’ permission. That’s because the War Powers Act allows the president to take some military action on his own, as long as it’s more of a oneoff situation and not long term.
If Trump wants to go any further, the experts say, he’s going to need Congress’ blessing.
The line on when a president needs Congress’ approval is fuzzy, but it’s more of a know-it-when-you-seeit-situation, said Phillip Carter, a senior fellow with the national security-focused Center for a New American Security think tank.
A president’s unilateral power, he said, is “something short of war. It’s the use of force by the president to achieve an immediate end,” he said. President Ronald Reagan didn’t seek congressional approval when he bombed Libya in retaliation for a bombing of a Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, Scotland. In the ’90s, both President George H.W. Bush and President Bill Clinton dropped bombs in Iraq on their own, in between the Persian Gulf War and the Iraq War.
Jens David Ohlin, an associate dean at Cornell Law School, agreed that Trump is in the clear for now: “He would need congressional authorization if he wants this to be a sustained attack, but if this is just a one-off attack, then I don’t think he really needs congressional authorization.”
But even if Trump had not ordered the United States’ first direct military strike on Syria’s government since that country’s civil war began six years ago, he probably would need to go to Congress to get authorization just to keep up the status quo from the previous administration.
President Barack Obama never launched Tomahawk missiles at a Syrian government airfield, but even his drone strikes in the region were legally flimsy.
That’s because the only two authorizations of military force on the books right now are 15 years old and arguably out of context with the actions of both Trump and Obama. In the year after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Congress authorized President George W. Bush to battle al-Qaida.
Most scholars would agree that is a separate terrorist group from the Islamic State group that Obama was targeting and Trump has expressed a desire to bomb. And those authorizations don’t come close to addressing the target of Trump’s missile strike Thursday: the airfield of a nation’s military.
“There are few more slippery slopes than that to war,” Carter said.
Obama never launched Tomahawk missiles at Syria’s government, but for much of his presidency, he tried to square the circle of a 15-yearold authorization and his desire to get involved in Syria: He kept asking Congress to authorize him to use military force in Iraq and Syria against Islamic State militants, even as he maintained that the authorizations already in place were valid.
Obama never managed to get that approval from Congress. His request for a threeyear authorization of force in Syria got torn apart between liberal Democrats/libertarian Republicans who didn’t want to OK military action in any form and hawkish Republicans who wanted to give the president more authority than he asked for. (In 2013, more than 100 mostly Republican House lawmakers signed onto a letter demanding that Obama seek congressional approval for what Trump just did.)
There also were a number of Democrats and Republicans who were wary of authorizing the White House’s war powers in an election year, when they weren’t sure to whom else they would be handing the keys to the bombers.
Many of those dynamics may have changed now that Trump is president. Trump has a hands-off worldview on global affairs, but he’s also been supportive of expanding the powers of the presidency. Ohlin, the law school dean, thinks that if Trump went to a Republican Congress and asked for a broad authorization of military force, it would be willing to give it to him.
But it’s unclear whether those applauded Trump’s strike Thursday could pass a broad authorization of force for the president. There are plenty members of Congress on both sides who first want to know what Trump plans to do with it.
“I don’t think people know exactly where Trump is going to go with his foreign and military policy,” Ohlin said, “and he may not even know.”
The U.S. courts have stayed out of this, Ohlin said, preferring to let the other two branches duke it out.