A confederacy of Otises
What’s the point of having a Congress if it won’t exercise the real powers vested in it? Are they lawmakers or simply a student council?
Twice this week, the U.S. Congress, both the Senate and House chambers, voted down a demand that the president come to Congress for authorization for its war-making in Iran. The House voted 219 to 212 on Thursday, nearly along party lines, “to block consideration of a bipartisan resolution that would end offensive military operations in Iran that had not been approved by Congress.” Four Democrats opposed the resolution. Two Republicans supported it. Collectively, they surrendered their constitutional powers without a shot.
But, of course, it’s not a war. Another name will be found for it.
The New York Times reports:
“The Constitution is clear: Our Constitution provides Congress initiatory powers of war,” Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky and the lead sponsor of the resolution, said during debate on the House floor, directly challenging members of his own party.
Mr. Massie, who cosponsored the measure with Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, noted that the War Powers Resolution of 1973 allows the president to go around Congress and exercise unilateral authority to use force only if there has been a declaration of war, specific statutory authorization or a national emergency created by an attack on the United States.
“None of those conditions exist today,” Mr. Massie said.
After a series of classified briefings led by senior Trump administration officials, Democrats said the case had not been made that the president had needed to act unilaterally.
Donald Trump did anyway.
You knew he would. So did Conor Friedersdorf of The Atlantic:
During the run-up to the 2016 election, I wrote that “if you’re a voter who believes that Donald Trump is against foreign wars and regime change, unlike the globalist elites in Washington, D.C., you have been misled.” At the time, I noted that Trump released a video in 2011 that sought to pressure President Obama to invade Libya. Trump also argued that George H. W. Bush should have ousted Saddam Hussein in Iraq, and wrote in his 2000 book, The America We Deserve, “We still don’t know what Iraq is up to or whether it has the material to build nuclear weapons.” He added, “Am I being contradictory here, by presenting myself as a deal-maker and then recommending preemptive strikes? I don’t think so.” In 2011, he urged the Navy to wage war on Somali pirates.
Now Trump has proved his proclivity for interventionism, without congressional approval or the support of the public. And there’s no evidence to suggest that he will stop here. If Congress continues allowing him to deploy force unilaterally, he may pursue land strikes on drug cartels in Mexico, a prospect that he raised early this year in an interview with Fox News; regime change in Cuba, a longtime dream of Rubio’s; and God knows what else. He is an impulsive man who gambles, especially when the most significant risks are borne by others. There is no way to know how exactly he will surprise Americans next.
“The United States is now enmeshed in so many conflicts that its foreign policy is closer to ‘world police’ than ‘America First’, ” chides Friedersdorf. As candidate, Trump promoted himself as the “peace president” while lobbying for the Nobel Peace Prize.
“It’s the phoniness of it all. It’s the phoniness and this cruelty. Donald is cruel,” Trump’s sister Maryanne Trump Barry, a retired federal judge, told Trump’s niece Mary L. Trump in a secretly recorded interview.
“He has no principles. None. None.”
Trump is engaged in another criminal enterprise, this time involving spilling blood. The question is whether Congress has the balls to parent a career criminal with possession of the nuclear launch codes and in control of the world’s most powerful military. It is because Trump is the most insecure, emotionally damaged president of our time that he surrounds himself with total nincompoops. And because he helps elect them to Congress expressly to do his bidding, over half of that body is populated with ass-kissing Otis wannabes.
God help us.