
WASHINGTON—By a 47-53 vote, senators rejected invoking the congressional power to declare war and using the War Powers Act to stop GOP President Donald Trump’s war on Iran.
With two exceptions, the June 27 vote was on party lines. Forty-four Democrats, both independents and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., supported stopping Trump. The other 52 Republicans, plus John Fetterman, D-Pa., backed Trump’s war.
Trump had the U.S. Air Force bomb three nuclear sites in Iran, including dropping large “bunker-buster” bombs on an underground site. He acted in concert with his right-wing comrade-in-arms, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Trump bragged the U.S. bombs destroyed all three facilities, but U.S. intelligence estimates said he’s wrong. Even the Israelis admitted that Iran is two to three years away from making a nuclear weapon, despite Israel’s own bombing and control of Iran’s skies.
Debate on the anti-war resolution, offered by Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., revolved not around the bombing itself, but around Trump’s violating the U.S. Constitution by making war on Iran on his own say-so, shoving Congress and its constitutional power to declare war aside.
“Going to war against Iran and supporting Israel’s unprovoked attacks against that country is not something that we should be doing. We do not need another unnecessary and costly war. We have had enough of them,” said Sen. Bernie Sanders, Ind-Vt., who has tried repeatedly—and failed—to cut off U.S. military aid to Israel.
His colleagues shy away from cutting off the funds due to GOP fear of Trump and Democratic fear of political retribution from the notoriously pro-Netanyahu and well-heeled American Israel Public Affairs Committee, a mouthpiece for Israel’s right wing.
“War often has awful and unintended consequences,” Sanders warned his colleagues. “It should only be considered as a last resort. We should not go to war against Iran.
“Let me state the obvious. Trump’s attack against Iran is unconstitutional. Congress, alone, has the authority to take this country into war. Not the president. Trump does not have that authority.
“Iran did not pose an imminent military threat to the United States that would justify a preemptive attack,” Sanders continued. “Just a few months ago, Trump’s own Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, testified the American intelligence community ‘continues to assess Iran is not building a nuclear weapon and Supreme Leader Khamenei has not authorized the nuclear weapons programs he suspended in 2003.’”
“Wars are easy to start. They are hard to end,” added Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.
Sens. Sanders, Merkley, Chris Van Hollen, D-Md., Adam Schiff, D-Calif., and Chris Murphy, D-Conn., all pointed out that prior wars—including the Indochina War, which Sanders marched against just after college graduation—and the U.S. war on Iraq, which overthrew then-dictator Saddam Hussein, were based “on a series of lies,” as the Vermonter put it.
Kentuckian Rand Paul, the sole GOPer to defy Trump, added that putting war powers in the hands of Congress, not the president, was unanimous among the Constitution’s writers. Even frequent foes James Madison and Alexander Hamilton—Hamilton pushed extensive presidential power–agreed on that.
“In 1964, Congress voted, with little debate, for a Gulf of Tonkin resolution giving President [Lyndon] Johnson the authority to escalate American military involvement in Vietnam. As a result, the United States expanded its presence in that country, and we were dragged fully into Vietnam’s civil war,” said Sanders.
“Eventually, some 2.7 million Americans served in Vietnam. More than 58,000 died, and over 300,000 were wounded. The Vietnam War devastated an entire generation. It killed millions of Vietnamese, and it destabilized the region. It cost U.S. taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars.”
The Iraq War was a rerun of Vietnam in both the lies used to justify the attack and the costs to the U.S., the Iraqis, and world peace, Sanders added. Netanyahu, already Israel’s prime minister, “beat the drum” for that war, too.
“Netanyahu should not be dictating U.S. foreign and military policy. Trump’s attack on Iran would not have occurred if Israel had not launched an illegal, unprovoked, surprise attack on Iran on June 13, sabotaging U.S. diplomatic efforts.
“If the people of Israel support Netanyahu’s decision to start a war with Iran, that is their business. That is their war. The United States should not be part of it.”
Other foes of Trump’s war on Iran took up the constitutional theme.
Constitution charges the Congress, not the President
“Regardless of whether you support the president’s decision to engage in preemptive strikes in the first place, regardless of whether or not you support the president generally or you do not, the Constitution charges the Congress, not the president, with the power to declare war,” said Sen. Adam Schiff, D-Calif.
“There is no ambiguity when it comes to the Constitution. Article I, section 8 provides ‘Congress shall have [the] power…to declare war.’” Not the president, or the president if it is not convenient to the Congress, but the Congress. And this body, for far too long, has been allergic to the responsibility it has to govern the use of military force.”
Kaine’s war powers resolution, which would have ordered Trump to end his war within 60 days, “reaffirms a basic principle: The decisions of war and peace belong under our Constitution to Congress, not to the president,” said Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore.
“The purpose of the founders was to give the American people a voice in government–a revolutionary idea at the time,” said Chris Murphy, the Connecticut Democrat. “But it was also to order our government in a way that war would become less likely, would become less frequent.
“They imagined a world–this new America–in which peace would be the rule, not war, as it was at the time for the citizens of Europe who lived under the rule of kings prone to war, incentivized to war, as James Madison wrote to Thomas Jefferson.
When Trump ordered U.S. bombs to be dropped on the Iranian nuclear facilities, “There was no congressional authorization. There was no debate. There was no vote. The president made a unilateral decision that risked bringing the United States into another extended war in the Middle East,” said California Democrat Schiff.
“That is not how our founders designed our nation through the architecture of the Constitution.” Each lawmaker, Schiff reminded them, “swore an oath to uphold that Constitution that places the responsibility for declaring war upon this body, not upon the individual who sits in the Oval Office.”
“This resolution asks: Do you support the Constitution and the role it gives to Congress to declare war?” Van Hollen said. “Do you believe the people’s representatives should have a voice in whether American lives and, specifically, the lives of our nation’s armed forces, are put at grave risk?
“We owe it to our troops, and we owe it to the American people to ensure no president–not this president or any other–can unilaterally commit our nation to go to war.
“The Constitution does entrust that responsibility to us. Let’s not abdicate it.”
Sen. Bill Hagerty, R-Tenn., led the GOP opposition to Kaine’s War Powers resolution. His statement wrapped Trump in Article II of the Constitution, the presidential responsibility of commander-in-chief once war is declared. Hagerty said he “understands and respects the congressional role in matters of war and peace,” but that was his sole nod to it. Trump, Hagerty said, was within “his constitutional authority” and “his solemn oath” to defend the U.S.
Hagerty figuratively, if not literally, wrapped Trump in the flag. The War Powers resolution “removes the ability of the president…to act decisively in defense of national interests, our allies, and our armed forces,” he said. It “would signal America’s resolve can be hamstrung by congressional hesitation at the very moment when clarity, unity, and strength are most needed.”
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