On Monday, two days after President Trump declared “Mission Accomplished” on the latest round of missile strikes against Syria, a bipartisan group of senators unveiled legislation intended to reassert Congress’s relevance to the wars we fight. But the new Authorization for the Use of Military Force, introduced by Bob Corker, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman, and the Democrat Tim Kaine, may end up doing the opposite.
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The Corker-Kaine resolution won’t bring an end to the Forever War; it will institutionalize it. Instead of ratifying war powers that three presidents in a row have seized illegally, Congress should repeal — and not replace — the 2001 legislation.
In authorizing the use of force against a list of terrorist organizations and their affiliates, the bill states that it “establishes rigorous congressional oversight,” “improves transparency” and ensures “regular congressional review and debate.” Such transparency requirements are an improvement over the status quo. But the bill also turns the constitutional warmaking process upside down.
Our Constitution was designed to make war difficult, requiring the assent of both houses and the president. The bill essentially changes that by merely requiring “regular congressional review” of presidential warmaking and requires reauthorization every four years; meanwhile, choosing new enemies, in new countries, is the president’s call, unless Congress can assemble a veto-proof majority to check him.
The legislation concurs with the argument asserted by Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and now Donald Trump that the war on terror has “evolved”; as the draft authorization announces in its preamble: “Numerous nonstate actors” now “pose a grave threat to the United States.” For both the White House and Senators Corker and Kaine, this justifies giving the president new warmaking powers, with Congress taking a back seat.
And yet if the past 17 years have taught us anything, it’s that far from being an existential menace, in most cases terrorism is a manageable threat: Since Sept. 11, an American’s chance of being killed in the United States by a terrorist is about one in 40 million. And the groups that Corker-Kaine authorizes war with — the Taliban, Al Qaeda and the Islamic State — do not pose a grave threat to our country now, if they ever did.
All three are either contained or decimated; why Mr. Trump and future presidents need a perpetually renewable authorization to fight them is not clear. Still less do they need continuing authority to wage war against Al Shabab in Somalia or the Haqqani Network in Afghanistan, among other groups explicitly named in the Corker-Kaine bill.
Instead, Congress should declare that the purposes of the 2001 authorization have been fulfilled and that it has run its constitutionally justified course.
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Originally Posted by Swordsmyth
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