‘A Congress Without Ambition’: Lawmakers Give Trump Blank Check On War
HuffPost
The GOP legislature has become a "rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do," one senator said after a failed vote on the Iran war this week.
WASHINGTON – In ducking a vote on authorizing war against Iran this week, Congress ceded its constitutional responsibilities yet again, some lawmakers warned, empowering current and future presidents to launch large wars unilaterally, in a major break with the nation’s founding principles.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle said that allowing President Donald Trump to wage an open-ended war in the Middle East without their explicit approval could set a dangerous precedent, ensuring that important decisions about war and peace are no longer made democratically after open debate, but rather behind closed doors and by a single person.
“There was a time, not too long ago, we voted to go into the Iraq war. We voted to go into the Afghan war,” Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) told HuffPost, calling the lack of a vote on Iran “a bad precedent.”
“This is a Congress without ambition,” he lamented. “This is a Congress without a belief structure in defending legislative prerogative. They just are a rubber stamp for whatever a president tells them to do.”
Trump’s administration and its allies on Capitol Hill have made the strained argument that the massive U.S. bombardment of Iran was necessary to respond to an imminent threat, even though they’ve yet to present evidence of an imminent attack by Tehran against the U.S. They’ve also given a series of shifting explanations to further justify the war, ranging from regime change to taking out Iran’s nuclear program, its navy, and its ability to launch ballistic missiles.
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