(Washington) President Donald Trump’s unilateral decision to launch a major attack on Iran has opened a new chapter in a recurring debate in the United States: who is authorized to use the power to declare war in American democracy?
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The decision taken Saturday morning to strike Iran earned the president the accusation of having violated the Constitution by starting a war without authorization from Congress. The question should be debated during the week in Congress (a little late in view of events) under the War Powers Act (War Powers Resolution).
Many Democrats and at least two Republicans in Congress reacted to what Trump called “major combat operations” — and which he said could result in U.S. casualties, as “a lot of times happen in war” — insisting that Congress must vote on whether the country engages in such a conflict.
These accusations highlight a clear division between the way the founding fathers of the Constitution conceived of how an American-style democracy should work and the way it often operated, particularly during and after the Cold War. Presidents, both Republican and Democratic, have used the large standing armies maintained after World War II to commit forces to combat without Congressional authorization.
A limit often exceeded
In 1973, as the Vietnam War was winding down, Congress passed the War Powers Act with the aim of regaining the power to exercise its prerogatives.
The law spelled out a limited set of situations in which a president could unilaterally deploy forces in hostilities: essentially, when the country was under attack. Since then, every president has exceeded the limit set for them.
There War Powers Act also provided that unauthorized deployments to hostile situations must end after 60 days, unless Congress votes to approve them in the meantime. President Barack Obama, during the intervention in Libya in 2011, and Donald Trump, during his campaign of strikes against ships suspected of transporting cocaine from South America, both considered that this rule did not apply to air campaigns posing no risk to American forces.
The 1973 law also created a mechanism for Congress to compel presidents to immediately withdraw U.S. forces deployed without authorization in hostile situations.
It originally allowed lawmakers to act through a resolution that the president could not veto, but a 1983 Supreme Court ruling led to a change. Lawmakers must now send those measures to the White House, meaning they need a two-thirds majority in both chambers to override the presidential veto.
Accumulating precedents
Since that change, presidents have obtained congressional authorization to wage major ground wars – the 1990-1991 Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Iraq – and they have stretched the Afghanistan War Act, intended to target the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks, as if it constituted a permanent congressional authorization to strike al-Qaeda-affiliated militants elsewhere.
But they have also increasingly demanded the right to carry out more limited interventions – those deemed to be in the national interest and whose planned nature, scope and duration do not correspond to a “war” in the constitutional sense – without going through Congress.
Because lawmakers have not impeached presidents for these actions, these actions have accumulated and now constitute precedents on which their successors can rely.
Trump went further with the assassination of Gen. Qassem Soleimani, Iran’s top military commander, during his first term, the bombing of Iranian nuclear sites last year, his ongoing naval strike operation and his invasion of Venezuela in January to arrest its leader, Nicolás Maduro.
No Americans were killed during these operations. But Trump’s attack on Iran appears to be his most significant unilateral military operation to date.
This article was published in the New York Times.
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