Rep. Jim Himes (D-CT) has introduced a bill that would return the power to send troops into battle back to the Congress, and take away President Trump’s unilateral ability to deploy the US military.
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Himes told MSNBC’s The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:
This is an initiative that has been decades in the making. It probably goes back to the early years of the Vietnam War which was an undeclared war in which 50,000 plus or minus Americans lost their lives, and since then you’ve had this poisonous dynamic which is completely inconsistent with the Constitution Article 1 which gives the power to declare war to the Congress.
It’s been sort of a dark mutual agreement. The president likes the authority, and you know what? The Congress would rather not take the risk of putting its name on something that could go horribly wrong, so you are where we are today. And, by the way, it’s a bipartisan issue. I woke up one weekend to discover that the Democratic president was bombing Libya without congressional authority to do so. Now, this current president is essentially making war in the Middle East.
Rep. Himes made it clear that he didn’t expect this bill to pass, but that it represented the first step in a discussion that he called, “All the more pointed by where we sit today. A couple of weekends in a row it might be an early morning tweet, but the president has an awful lot of power, and this one, I’m not sure if I trust him to use that power as responsibly as we would like.”
The War Powers Act is the great turf war between the Legislative and Executive branches of the US government.
The Himes bill has two main parts. Congress won’t fund deploying troops without a declaration of war, and, “When requesting a declaration of war or Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), the President must issue a report outlining the threat faced, the objectives and justifications of the conflict and a description of the anticipated scope and duration of the action.”
With the Trump administration itching for a military build up and more war, the movement is Congress to limit Trump’s war-making powers will be worth watching in the months and years to come.
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