Well, not exactly rage-tweeted.If President Trump made the decision to assassinate the supreme leader of Iran, would he need to come to Congress to get authorization for it?
The Trump administration won’t say.
That remarkable claim is now being made by a Republican senator — Mike Lee of Utah. He offered it in a new interview with NPR, in which he shared fresh details about why he erupted in anger on Wednesday over the briefing Congress received from the administration on Iran.
[...]
Lee, echoing the complaints of many Democrats, blasted the briefing on the intelligence behind the assassination as the “worst” he’d ever seen. He also fumed that officials refused to acknowledge any “hypothetical” situations in which they would come to Congress for authorization for future military hostilities against Iran.
[...]
Lee reiterated that officials “were unable or unwilling to identify any point” at which they’d come to Congress for authorization for the use of military force.
[...]
As I recall, one of my colleagues asked a hypothetical involving the Supreme Leader of Iran: If at that point, the United States government decided that it wanted to undertake a strike against him personally, recognizing that he would be a threat to the United States, would that require authorization for the use of military force?[...]
The fact that there was nothing but a refusal to answer that question was perhaps the most deeply upsetting thing to me in that meeting.
“If the administration won’t concede that this is a clear example of when they would they would have to go to Congress, it’s hard to imagine what would be,” Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at the University of Texas at Austin, added. “This underscores just how completely irrelevant they view Congress to be in the war powers conversation.”
[...]
It’s worth stressing that this is emerging as the explicit position among Trump’s loyalists and propagandists. Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) is now dismissing concerns about the need for Congress to reassert its warmaking authority as “emboldening the enemy.”
Meanwhile, Trump just rage-tweeted that he wants “all House Republicans” to “vote against Crazy Nancy Pelosi’s War Powers Resolution.”
WaPo
Please don't make me defend Trump.
Indeed.That’s a reference to a measure that the House speaker is putting to a House vote Thursday that would require Trump to cease any military hostilities against Iran 30 days after enactment, if he hasn’t received congressional authorization for it. The House will all but certainly pass this, and there are other tougher measures on tap.
[...]
But despite this, the GOP-controlled Senate is still likely to block such efforts. Last spring, a similar measure failed to get the 60 votes needed for passage, with all but four GOP senators voting against it. Virtually all GOP senators will likely vote against the new one, too.
[...]
Trump’s tweet calling on “all House Republicans” to vote against the new war powers measure now means that being loyal to Trump is synonymous with giving him unconstrained warmaking authority, despite all the madness we’ve seen.
[...]
By the way, it requires restating: Former president Barack Obama abused the war power as well, and far too many congressional Democrats went along with it. Congress has been abdicating its war-declaring authority for decades.
No comments:
Post a Comment