A move to write new war powers to authorize US President Barack Obama’s administration’s nine-month-old battle against Islamic State militants has stalled in the US Congress and might even be dead.
Obama does not seem to mind, and while legislators say they do not want to give up their check on a commander-in-chief’s authority to use the military, they have little interest in having what would be the first congressional war vote in 13 years.
US Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker was recently asked whether Congress was still going to craft a new Authorization for the Use of Military Force.
After Obama ordered airstrikes in August last year over Iraq and in September last year over Syria against Islamic State militants, legislators said that he was justifying the action with dusty war powers written to authorize conflicts after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks in the US.
Today, there is hardly a word about it in Congress.
US Representative Adam Schiff, the top Democrat on the US House of Representatives Intelligence Committee, said that Congress has much to lose if it does not act.
“As an institution, we are the ones who are going to suffer because future presidents are going to look back at this and say: ‘We do not need Congress to make war.’ It is a terrible precedent,” Schiff said.
He said that if a new military force authorization is not passed, this Congress will have done more to weaken its own power as a check on the executive branch than any other Congress in memory.
In the US battle against the group previously known as the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, Obama has relied on congressional authorizations given to former US president George W. Bush for the war on al-Qaeda and the Iraq invasion.
The White House said they gave Obama authority to act without new approval by Congress under the 1973 War Powers Act.
The act, passed during the Vietnam War, serves as a constitutional check on presidential power to declare war without congressional consent. It requires presidents to notify Congress within 48 hours of military action and limits the use of military forces to no more than 60 days unless Congress authorizes force or declares war.
Obama has insisted that he is on firm legal footing in sending more than 4,000 US troops to train and assist Iraqi security forces and launching thousands of airstrikes against targets in Iraq and Syria, but he has also said that he would welcome a new authorization to cover the current military operations.
Generally, conservatives want Congress to approve broad authorities for the president to fight Islamic State militants, with no limits on ground troops.
They say that prohibiting the use of US combat troops or restricting the fight to Iraq and Syria only emboldens the militants, who would seek safe havens outside the borders of those nations.
Other legislators want any new war powers to be narrowly defined to give the president authority to train and equip local forces and conduct airstrikes, but not to launch a combat mission on the ground.
The fighting in Iraq heated up again this weekend as the contested city of Ramadi fell to Islamic State fighters on Sunday, and Iraqi forces abandoned their weapons and vehicles to flee the provincial capital in a major loss, despite intensified US-led airstrikes.
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