There was a lot of bellyaching about Trump not going to Congress to seek authorization to attack Iran. But they would have given it to him. He knows they're no obstacle. He'll do whatever he wants. They'll bellyache, and that's music to his ears. They won't rein him in.
They don't listen to Nancy any more.
Primary challenges better be coming.
Five Senate Republicans broke ranks, voted with Democrats and advanced a war powers resolution aimed at reining in U.S. military action in Venezuela. The measure was specifically crafted to “direct the removal of United States Armed Forces from hostilities within or against Venezuela that have not been authorized by Congress.”
The bipartisan breakthrough was, however, on a procedural vote. There was still one more Senate vote necessary to approve the resolution. If the 53 members who backed the measure last week stuck together, it would move to the House for consideration.
That didn’t happen.
MS Now
Gee, who were the two wimps?When five Senate Republicans voted with Democrats last week to advance a resolution to restrict President Donald Trump’s military authority in Venezuela, it looked like a significant rebuke of the administration.
Now, a week later — after two Republicans flipped their votes following intense lobbying from Trump and the White House — it looks like the latest example of GOP lawmakers bowing to the president.
MS Now
Oh, for crying out loud.The turn of events came to fruition after Republican Sens. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Todd Young of Indiana — two of the GOP senators who voted to advance the measure last week — sided with Republicans on a point of order to rule the war powers resolution ineligible for a fast-track vote.
[...]
On Wednesday, Senate Republicans approved a procedural gambit to block the Venezuela war powers resolution from getting a final vote, stopping the bipartisan effort dead in its tracks after it appeared headed for success.
The vote was 51-50, after Vice President JD Vance arrived at the Capitol on Wednesday night to break a tie.
[...]
Republican Sens. Rand Paul of Kentucky, Susan Collins of Maine and Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, who voted to advance the resolution last week, still sided with Democrats against the procedural maneuver.
[...]
Hawley and Young said their decisions came down to assurances from Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who said the U.S. did not have troops on the ground in Venezuela and would not send any without notifying Congress.
He didn't even actually say they'd consult Congress. Just that they'd notify them. And worse, yet...In a letter written to Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Jim Risch, R-Idaho, and obtained by MS NOW, Rubio said the deployment of active-duty service members in Caracas “will be undertaken consistent with the Constitution of the United States and we will transmit written notifications.” He echoed that sentiment in a communication to Young.
"Circumstances permitting."“Should the President determine that he intends to introduce U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities in major military operations in Venezuela, he would seek congressional authorization in advance (circumstances permitting),” Rubio wrote.
Assurances? What assurances?Last week, Hawley said he voted to advance the resolution because “my read of the Constitution is that if the president feels the need to put boots on the ground there in the future, Congress would need to vote on it.” But after Rubio’s assurances, Hawley changed his mind.
We all were surprised that Hawley voted with the Dems on this in the first place. Why'd he bother? Trying to reform his reputation as a craven coward? If so, I don't think it worked.“The secretary also told me directly that the administration will not put ground troops into Venezuela,” Hawley said. “They do not seek to occupy Venezuela, but his commitment to abide by the War Powers notification procedures and also the Constitution is directly responsive to my concerns, so I’m inclined to take yes for an answer.”
Perhaps even more craven than Hawley.Young expressed a similar sentiment, but he also pointed to the unlikely effort of the war powers resolution ever being signed into law: With a presidential veto all but certain should the measure land on Trump’s desk, the fight was futile.
And you have communicated that you're a total pouff.“Those who understand how Congress works, the good and the bad and ugly, understand that votes like this, in the end, are communications exercises,” Young said. “They’re important communications exercises, but unless you can secure sufficient votes, not only to pass the United States Senate, but to get out of the House, which is highly questionable, right, and then to override what was an inevitable presidential veto, which is impossible, no one can tell me how we get there, I had to accept that this was all a communications exercise.”
And that's the real reason Hawley and Young went scuttling back under cover.[T]he reversals from Hawley and Young came after Trump deployed an intense pressure campaign against the five Republican senators who voted to advance the resolution.
Shortly after the Senate voted to open debate on the resolution, Trump unleashed his anger on social media, saying Republicans should be “ashamed” of the quintet and declaring that they “should never be elected to office again.”
Then, serious kudos to Paul, Murkowski, and Collins. Collins!The president also made his frustrations known directly: He called the five Senate Republicans who voted to advance the war powers resolution, according to a source familiar with the call who requested anonymity to discuss the private conversation. The source said the president, who was described as being “very upset, angry, yelling,” berated “more than one senator.”
LOLOLOL. Outreach on substance. That's what we're calling Trump's temper tantrums now.Hawley recognized that lobbying when explaining his stance, but said it wasn’t coercion.
“I didn’t feel pressure,” Hawley said. “But I felt a lot of outreach on substance.”
Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri was the first to fold, announcing his reversal on Wednesday morning, and Indiana’s Todd Young soon followed suit.
[...]
On Tuesday, during remarks in Detroit, Trump continued to target the senators who’d disappointed him, slamming Paul as a “stone-cold loser” and describing Collins and Murkowski as “disasters.”
MS Now
But, does the House have to agree?[T]he ghosts of history are never all that welcome in Washington. It’s a place that has a hard time looking back and an even harder time doing anything to rectify past mistakes. The capital has a case of “permanent historical amnesia.”
[...]
Which made it all the more notable when the Senate met on Thursday to take a key procedural vote on a measure to repeal the two-decade-old authorization that provided the legal basis for Bush’s invasion of Iraq. [...] “The last time we’ve had a stand-alone vote on the floor,” for something like this Iraq repeal measure, [Democratic Senator Tim] Kaine noted, “is probably before anybody in the Senate was born. It’s just something that we’ve abdicated.”
[...]
This scheduling offered not only a chance to reassert Congress’s constitutional power to declare war but also the nearly irresistible opportunity to make a political point about the historic folly of that particular war. In their remarks before the Senate overwhelmingly voted, 68–27, to invoke cloture and clear the way for a vote next week.
New Yorker
There's one point on which I'm in agreement with Trump.Two decades ago, Bush and the Republicans were nearly united in their embrace of a brash militarism that sought to topple Saddam and transform Iraq and the broader Middle East in the process. [...] [B]acklash to the conflict arguably gave rise to the Presidencies of both Barack Obama—who first rose to fame as an antiwar state legislator—and Donald Trump. Trump is a Bush-basher of long standing, and he often framed his takeover of the Republican Party as an explicit repudiation of the extended Bush family and its internationalist legacy. Trump has said Bush “lied” to start the war, that he should have been impeached for how badly it was conducted, and that, over all, Bush had a “failed and uninspiring Presidency.”
...but hey, do what you want...you will anyway.Much as the Vietnam War did for a previous generation, the failures in Iraq shattered American confidence, shaped future debates over the use of military force, made the concept of democracy promotion itself suspect, distracted from rising threats posed by the revisionist great powers Russia and China, and splintered the previously unquestioned Republican commitment to a robustly internationalist American foreign policy.
[...]
DeSantis, back in the pre-Trump era of 2015, publicly bashed Obama for not providing enough arms to Ukraine. His flip-flop is so telling. There may still be Bush-style internationalists left in Washington, but it says everything about the trajectory of the Party’s foreign-policy thinking that both of its 2024 front-runners think that’s not where the primary voters they seek stand.
[...]
In a remarkable statement dismissing the [Russian invasion of Ukraine] as little more than a “territorial dispute,” DeSantis seemed to signal how much he thinks Republican sentiment has shifted since the Bush era. You don’t have to support the disastrous invasion of Iraq to acknowledge that Russia’s barbaric war of aggression against its neighbor Ukraine is wrong, and yet that is where both Trump and DeSantis have now landed. [...] DeSantis’s comments to Fox News’ Tucker Carlson [...] drew strong pushback from the remaining Republican hawks in the old Bush mold. The Wall Street Journal editorial board called it his “first big mistake.” Lindsey Graham called it a “Neville Chamberlain approach” of appeasement. Nikki Haley pointedly observed that DeSantis was just “copying” Trump with his new position.
[...]
Many officials other than Bush himself, of course, have admitted the invasion was a mistake, “a grave and costly error,” as the former Bush speechwriter David Frum wrote in The Atlantic this week. I believe there is a straight line that leads from that debacle to the political mess we are in today.
He'll veto it, but he'll be nasty-tweeting those Republicans who voted for it: Mike Lee, Rand Paul, Lamar Alexander, Bill Cassidy, Susan Collins, Jerry Moran, Lisa Murkowski, and Todd Young.The Senate voted on Thursday to require that President Trump seek congressional authorization before taking further military action against Iran, as Democrats joined forces with eight Republicans to try to rein in the president’s war-making powers weeks after he escalated hostilities with Tehran.
The bipartisan vote, 55 to 45, amounted to a rare attempt by the Senate to restrain Mr. Trump’s authority just over a week after it voted to acquit him of impeachment charges, and nearly six weeks after the president moved without authorization from Congress to kill a top Iranian security commander.
But it was a mostly symbolic rebuke of the president, as support for the measure fell short of the two-thirds supermajority needed to override a promised veto by Mr. Trump.
NYT
So maybe the newly released documents from Lev Parnas will make some more of them think again.When Tim Kaine was pushing Republicans to support his effort to curb military action in Iran, he kept hearing concerns that the resolution was an attack on President Donald Trump.
[...]
“When they said, ‘Is this about President Trump? Isn’t this about any president?’ I said you’re right, it’s about any president,” Kaine said, adding that he then nixed the sections in his resolution that specifically mentioned Trump.
[Mike] Lee and [Rand] Paul eventually backed the resolution, after a briefing from top administration officials about the killing of General Qassem Soleimani left them deeply dissatisfied. And on Tuesday, Kaine got additional support from Republican Sens. Todd Young of Indiana and Susan Collins of Maine, giving him the four Republican votes he needs to pass the measure.
Politico
The timing shouldn't be a problem. The timing should be dispositive.Last year, the Senate passed a bipartisan War Powers resolution to end U.S. support for the Saudi-backed war in Yemen, which Trump vetoed.
The chamber also voted on an amendment to the defense authorization bill from Kaine and Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) that would require Trump to seek congressional approval for military action in Iran. The amendment, however, didn’t meet the 60-vote threshold to pass.
[...]
[Kaine] notes that he also called for President Barack Obama to come to Congress when it came to the war with ISIS or possibly striking Syria for the use of chemical weapons. That position, Kaine says, has helped him earn trust in his conversations with Republicans when it comes to this president.
[...]
Kaine said there are about 10 to 12 Republicans who could possibly back the War Powers Resolution. But it’s likely to be met with resistance from most members of the Senate GOP, who have raised concerns about the resolution’s timing amid recent tensions with Iran and fear further restricting Trump’s authority.
Wrong lesson, Mitt.Sen. Mitt Romney (R-Utah) said in a statement Tuesday that he will oppose Kaine’s resolution, arguing it would “send the wrong message to Iran” and “tie the President’s hands in responding to further potential Iranian aggression.”
Or not at all, when you consider the fact that Mitch McConnell gets to choose.Collins, who initially had concerns about the message Kaine’s resolution would send to Iran, had qualms about some of the earlier language, particularly when it came to removing troops from hostilities. Kaine, however, helped convince her by clarifying language that the resolution aimed to “terminate the use of U.S. forces in hostilities." That change appeared to appease Collins.
[...]
Kaine initially drafted the War Powers resolution three months ago. The latest version of his resolution can come to the Senate floor as early as next week.
Color me skeptical on those Republicans. Particularly Susan Collins. She's famous for making noises about being independent but voting in sync with the GOP bosses.Sen. Tim Kaine (D-Va.) is circulating a bipartisan resolution that would direct Trump to remove U.S. forces from any hostilities against Iran within 30 days of its enactment.
GOP Sens. Mike Lee (Utah) and Rand Paul (Ky.) have already voiced their support for the measure, and Kaine says about eight more Republicans, including Sens. Susan Collins (Maine), Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Todd Young (Ind.) and Mitt Romney (Utah), are reviewing it.
Democrats can force a vote on the measure at any time, but Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) on Monday said a vote will happen later in the week.
Schumer wants to make sure his entire caucus is present, increasing the odds that a vote would be held sometime after Tuesday night’s Democratic presidential primary debate in Iowa.
It needs only a simple majority to pass.
The Hill
So if they're not going to override a veto for something as dire as the situation in Yemen, they should be safe voting for the resolution. But will they be even that brave? I have serious doubts.Seven Senate Republicans voted in March to direct Trump to withdraw U.S. forces from supporting a Saudi-led coalition fighting in Yemen’s civil war, a resolution that Trump later vetoed and Congress failed to override.
Eleven GOP senators voted with Democrats in September to terminate a national emergency declaration Trump used to justify shifting military funds to construction of the border wall without congressional consent. Twelve GOP senators voted for a similar resolution in March.
That caveat is going to cost him.Lee, who called last week’s Iran briefing “insulting and demeaning,” said on CBS’s “Face the Nation” that the first time he heard about a potential Iranian plot to attack four U.S. embassies was during Trump’s interview with Fox News.
“Do you have a problem with learning that on television?” host Margaret Brennan asked.
“Yes, but the problem there is not with the president the problem is with those who were briefing us,” Lee responded.
“Those who were briefings us, I believe, would have done a different job under the light of day, had television cameras been there, than they did in private where his boss couldn't see what they were saying,” he added.
“They were not helpful and they did not reflect well on the presidents great restraint that he's shown.”
[...]
“In order to know and understand where one power ends and one [begins],” Lee said, noting the Constitutional duties of the president and congress in regards to military action, “in any context we need to have a certain amount of information and an adequate amount of information was not shared with us.”
The Hill
Further reason to discount all of the administration's excuses for assassinating Soleimani, except for retaliation.The attempt to take out Shahlai simultaneously with Soleimani suggests that this wasn’t an isolated, defensive operation but may have been part of a broader attack on the Quds Force.
Shahlai is operating in Yemen, meaning the conflict he is waging at the moment is less against the United States than against Saudi Arabia, which is engaged in a war in Yemen against Iran-backed rebels with our support.
In recent statements, administration officials have noted Shahlai’s role in a 2007 attack on American soldiers in Iraq, his support of Houthi rebels in Yemen and his “long history of involvement in attacks targeting the U.S. and our allies."
But if someone like Shahlai was planning to attack American forces — let’s say “imminently” — Yemen wouldn’t be the place to do it. Which suggests this may have been part of a broader operation to kill Iranian military leaders.
WaPo
No. The move for regime change in Iran covers decades of American foreign policy. It might stop - or be halted temporarily - if Bernie Sanders were to be elected in November, but it certainly won't if Joe Biden, or Amy Klobuchar, or Pete Buttigieg - and possibly even Elizabeth Warren - is.“If the objective was to weaken the Quds Force irrespective of any intelligence about imminent attacks on Americans, then where does that end?” [Rep. Tom Malinowski (D-N.J.)] said. “And is it over?”
Congress has weakened itself nearly out of the picture.Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has been invited to testify next week to the Foreign Affairs Committee.
But Engel told us that Pompeo has not said whether he’ll appear. “Right now it looks like he’s not coming,” [Rep. Eliot L. Engel (D-N.Y.), the chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Committee,] told us. “We haven’t heard from him.”
And then Trump claimed ("I can reveal...") it was four embassies.Pompeo has also been struggling to clean up after Trump’s public statements. In extemporaneous remarks Thursday, Trump said Soleimani was about to blow up the U.S. Embassy in Baghdad — the first time it had been suggested by anyone.
That led Pompeo to tell reporters on Friday: “Soleimani was actively planning new attacks, and he was looking very seriously at our embassies and not just the embassy in Baghdad.”
Wouldn't be the first time.Numerous Democratic senators are now saying that the threat to embassies was not part of the briefing given to members of Congress on Wednesday.
Which raises the possibility that it’s not actually true, but once the president said it, his national security team felt obligated to back him up.
Oh, it's not hard to imagine at all.It’s hard to imagine that four GOP senators — which is all the war powers measure would need to pass — would not be willing to assert congressional authority, given this latest news and all it indicates about how much we do not know about what the administration is secretly up to.
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
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.
And another thing: the Constitution commands that Congress holds the power to wage war. How has Congress been allowed to abdicate that consitutional duty for the past few decades?The failure of that vote last spring is looking particularly fateful right now. The measure, which was introduced by Sen. Tom Udall (D-N.M.) failed largely along party lines, with all but one (absent) Democrat voting for it and all but four Republicans voting against it.
Let’s also revisit the fact that as this measure was voted down, Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) assured us it wasn’t necessary.
“The president made it absolutely clear that he is not interested in starting a war with Iran,” McConnell told reporters in June. “Everybody ought to take a deep breath.”
WaPo
And...who was president in 1976? Gerald Ford. What were they worried about?Sen. Bob Corker (R-TN) wasn’t being hyperbolic when he said he feared President Trump was leading the U.S. “on the path to World War III,” a remark that escalated tensions between the retiring senator and the President.
On Wednesday, Corker announced that there would be a Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on Nov. 14 to review Trump’s authority to use nuclear weapons. Corker chairs the committee.
[...]
“This continues a series of hearings to examine those issues and will be the first time since 1976 that this committee or our House counterparts have looked specifically at the authority and process for using U.S. nuclear weapons. This discussion is long overdue, and we look forward to examining this critical issue.”
TPM
We. Rule. The WORLD!President Obama has sent 39 letters to Congress “consistent with” the War Powers Resolution requirements. The letters are a fascinating read and provide a 30,000-foot view of the Administration’s use of military force abroad.
[...]
In 2009, the consolidated reports explicitly reference operations and deployments in only four countries (Afghanistan, Iraq, Cuba, and Kosovo) and in the “Horn of Africa region.” However, the President also reported – as he has in every biannual report since – that the United States “has deployed various combat-equipped forces to a number of locations in the Central, Pacific, European, Southern, and Africa Command areas of operation in support of [Afghanistan] operations and other overseas operations.”
[...]
The most recent report, from December 2015, explicitly refers to ongoing operations of variable intensity in 14 countries: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Turkey, Somalia, Yemen, Djibouti, Libya, Cuba, Niger, Cameroon, Egypt, Jordan, and Kosovo. The report also references activities in “various countries in the central African region” related to efforts to defeat the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA). Earlier reports on the LRA indicated deployments to Uganda, South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and the Central African Republic, but, the letter says these details are now relegated to a classified annex.
It is impossible to say with certainty how broad the battlefield is, because (1) the nature and scope of deployments “in support of” operations in Afghanistan and “other overseas operations” remain obscure, and (2) we do not have access to the contents of the classified annexes that begin in 2010.
Lawfare Blog
