Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) speaks to reporters after a vote on a war powers measure on Capitol Hill on Wednesday.ERIC LEE/The New York Times
Leaders around the globe, American opponents of the war in Iran and Democrats impatient with their own lawmakers’ silence and inaction have repeatedly been asking the same question: Where is Congress and why, as missiles are being fired into Iran, isn’t it playing its constitutional role as the branch of government responsible for declaring war?
All of them got their answer Wednesday when the House of Representatives and the Senate, in unusual twin debates on presidential power in military undertakings, said: We intend to have a say.
But even so, it is clear that Congress ultimately will not block Donald Trump’s authority to wage war against Iran.
The Senate held what amounted to a debate on Iran war policy, but after hours of emotional argument decided not to permit a vote on whether to block the President’s unauthorized military action against Iran. The House will likely vote Thursday, but without Senate approval the measure has no prospect of becoming law.
The proceedings provided yet another example of two important characteristics of modern American politics.
One is the contemporary reluctance – not only in foreign policy but also in domestic affairs – of the legislative branch to provide the checks and balances on the executive branch called for in three separate articles of the Constitution. The other is the historical reluctance of Congress to restrain presidents in their projection of military force.
“There have been many congressional attempts to claw back their power to make war, but Congress has never been willing to actually use its ultimate weapon, the power of the purse,” said Philip Klinkner, a political scientist at Hamilton College in Clinton, N.Y. “They don’t want to seem to be not supporting U.S. troops. The result is that presidents have assumed a free hand in war. The only power to stop a president is in an election.”
Even in times of a more activist legislative branch, the struggle between Congress and the White House over the power to wage war has been one of the principal unresolved questions in the American system. That’s because of the ambiguities in the country’s founding document, which makes the president the commander-in-chief of the military and yet delegates the power to declare war to Congress.
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The debate on Capitol Hill only deepened that ambiguity, because even lawmakers who support curtailing Mr. Trump in Iran did not quibble with the notion of removing the theocratic leaders of the Islamic Republic and restraining that country’s ability to produce nuclear weapons.
In a 47-to-53 vote, the Senate decided against taking a formal War Powers Resolution vote − an action tantamount to refusing to restrain the President in Iran.
Congressional impatience with undeclared war in Vietnam prompted the approval of the War Powers Resolution in 1973. Since then, Republican Senator Lindsey Graham of South Carolina said Wednesday, presidents have authorized the use of military force 130 times without the approval of Congress.
Congress on occasion has questioned, but never blocked, those presidents, both Republicans and Democrats − and the effort to do so this time represented the most vigorous attempt in years.
“The declaration of war belongs to this body,” said Democratic Senator Raphael Warnock of Georgia. Democratic Senator Patty Murray of Washington added: “We have to assert our authority as a co-equal branch of government.”
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Across the Capitol in the House, Democratic Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries of New York accused the President of unilateral military action amounting to “setting fire to the Constitution.” Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, the leading Republican critic of the President’s policies, said the decision to go to war “must be voted on by the representatives of the people.”
Nobody quibbles with the notion of congressional power in declaring war, but for centuries presidents have repeatedly projected American force without formal declarations.
There was, for example, no declaration of war before or during the 1950-1953 Korean War. President Harry Truman preferred the term “police action” over the word “war.” The State Department, in a statement two decades before congressional Democrats attempted to curtail Richard Nixon’s Vietnam policies, cited 85 examples of presidents sending U.S. forces into battle without congressional authorization.
In the House debate, Mr. Jeffries said the President’s decision to go to war “without concrete reasons for putting American troops in harm’s way” was “outrageous and unacceptable.” In response, Michael McCaul of Texas said the Democrats were “risking the objectives of this critical mission solely for political reasons,” adding that “now is not the time to hold [back] our commander-in-chief.”
In both the Senate and the House, lawmakers spoke both of the valour of American military personnel and the danger that the President’s war plans have exposed them to.
“Our President is ordering our kids to be shipped off into war from his beach house in Florida,” Ms. Murray said.
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The Democrats’ line of debate clearly was an effort to compensate for months of congressional silence as Mr. Trump stretched presidential authority beyond constitutional and conventional barriers.
They married arguments of constitutional authority with specific critiques of the Trump military policy.
Senator Adam Schiff of California, one of Mr. Trump’s most persistent critics and the object of some of the most arch Trump attacks, spoke of the administration’s “shifting series of incoherent rationales” for the Iran war.
The administration’s case was made most forcefully by Mr. Graham, who acknowledged that Congress has a role in military affairs, but said “the way for Congress to check and balance [the President’s] decision is to cut off funds if they choose to,” not to curtail his powers.
The Senate nonetheless made it clear that, at least for now, those powers remain unrestrained.