Obama may have weakened presidency

Analysts say he may be undoing precedents on presidential power

By seeking OK from Congress, he reverses precedent.

WASHINGTON The Senate Foreign Relations Committee opens hearings today that any number of senators had demanded but just about no one had expected: On authorizing President Obama to order military strikes on Syria.

A string of modern presidents have studiously avoided setting just that precedent — that is, the expectation that they should get Congress’ OK before launching military action. Critics say the danger in doing so is that Obama may have weakened his own presidency. What happens if he doesn’t want to seek congressional authorization the next time? He may even have weakened the presidency itself.

That argument is part of the reason Ronald Reagan didn’t seek congressional authorization before ordering the invasion of Grenada, why George H. W. Bush didn’t seek authorization before launching military action in Panama, why Bill Clinton didn’t seek authorization before ordering the bombing of Kosovo. Indeed, Obama helped lead a NATO coalition that bombed Libya two years ago without going to Congress first.

This time, after sending out Secretary of State John Kerry to make a prosecutor’s case Friday that the Syrian regime had used chemical weapons against its own people and that a military response was urgent, Obama stunned nearly everyone — including some of his own advisers — by deciding he would seek congressional authorization before moving forward.

“While I believe I have the authority to carry out this military action

“Obama has reversed decades of precedent regarding the nature of presidential war powers.”

David Rothkopf, Foreign Policy magazine editor at large and Running the World author

without specific congressional authorization, I know that the country will be stronger if we take this course, and our actions will be even more effective,” Obama said Saturday.

So Kerry found himself on five morning talk shows Sunday to make the defense case for why a delay of at least a week or two would do no harm. Neither he nor Obama would directly respond when asked whether Obama would go ahead with the attack, which he says he has the authority to do, if Congress votes “no.”

“Obama has reversed decades of precedent regarding the nature of presidential war powers,” David Rothkopf of Foreign Policy magazine, author of Running the World, wrote in Newsday. “And whether you prefer this change in the balance of power or not, as a matter of quantifiable fact he is transferring greater responsibility for U. S. foreign policy to a Congress that is more divided, more incapable of reasoned debate or action, and more dysfunctional than any in modern American history.”

Obama’s actions exceed the mandates of the War Powers Act, enacted over President Nixon’s veto during the Vietnam War. The 1973 law requires a president to notify Congress within 48 hours of initiating military action and bars U. S. armed forces from fighting for more than 90 days without congressional approval. ( The Constitution gives Congress the power to declare war.)

Obama’s decision is consistent with the views he expressed when he was a senator from Illinois and George W. Bush was president. ( In a bit of trivia, the Obama administration is the first since the Benjamin Harrison administration in 1892 in which the president, the vice president, the secretary of State and the secretary of Defense or War are all veterans of Congress. Obama, Biden, Kerry and Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel are former senators; former secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton had served in the Senate and former Defense secretary Leon Panetta in the House.)

“I praise the president for doing this,” Ari Fleischer, a White House spokesman for George W. Bush, said Monday on CNN. “A nation is stronger — and I learned this as a result of Iraq — a nation is always stronger in a democracy when it has the people behind it.”

The vote puts members of Congress and other world leaders on the spot to put up or shut up — to back military action or explain why not.

But the first risk is that, having asked for a vote, Obama will have to win it. That hurdle tripped British Prime Minister David Cameron last week when Parliament rejected his proposal to join the U. S. action.

The second risk is, win or lose, Obama and future presidents may have to live with the precedent that he is setting.

PETE SOUZA, WHITE HOUSE, VIA GETTY IMAGES President Obama discusses Syria on the phone with House Speaker John Boehner with Vice President Biden in the Oval Office on Saturday.