Bring back the war declaration

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During the House of Representatives debate and vote on the National Defense Authorization Act early this month, lawmakers had their best chance in years to knock their heads together and talk war and peace. With several amendments on the floor dealing explicitly with the power to declare war, one would hope the chamber will use the experience as a wake-up call to press on and start to take these matters far more seriously.

It’s time for Congress to stop shying from its responsibility.

A declaration of war is the most consequential decision a member of Congress can make. It is baked into the U.S. Constitution as one of the enumerated powers bestowed upon the legislative branch. And for good reason: In their wisdom and foresight, the founders placed this awesome power in the hands of America’s elected representatives for a reason. The decision to plunge the United States into war was simply too important for a single individual, even a president, to make.

As James Madison observed during a debate with Alexander Hamilton in 1793, “In no part of the Constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department.”

Yet today, too many lawmakers have forgotten those words. Far too often, vote-seeking politicians shrink from the duty and avoid the very decisions their constituents sent them to Washington to make. The last time the Congress actually declared war was in June 1942, when the Senate unanimously approved a resolution against Romania. Between 1941 and 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt formally declared war a total of six times, the first on the very day Pearl Harbor was attacked by Japanese forces.

Article I, Section 8, Clause 11 of the U.S. Constitution is as clear as black-and-white: Congress declares war, and the president prosecutes it as commander-in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces.

Nowhere in the nation’s founding document is the president granted power to start a war, invade a country, or attack another country outside of an imminent threat to the American people. Nor does the Constitution grant presidents king-like powers. Unfortunately, the trend since World War II has regressed to a point that you would be forgiven for assuming that on matters of war and peace, the United States is a monarchy. Congress, in its quest to duck hard votes, has willfully turned itself into a collection of spectators.

As Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia said back in 2015, Congress has for generations “abdicated responsibility for declaring war under the Constitution.” Ditto Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky, who made the same argument earlier this year: “For too long, Congress has largely ceded the most important of its responsibilities to presidents of both parties.”

Congress, yearning to avoid difficulty, passed into law in 1973 the War Powers Resolution. The law allows the president to engage U.S. troops in combat for up to 60 days (with an additional 30 days for withdrawal), at which time the president must receive congressional approval for further military action either through an authorization of the use of military force or a war declaration. The justification for the War Powers Resolution was the necessity of responding rapidly to crisis, while blocking future repetitions of executive abuse such as that of a president who initiated U.S. military action in Cambodia in 1969 without so much as a consultation with the legislative branch. The founders would have turned in their graves.

While the War Powers Resolution was designed to prevent similar end-runs around the legislature, the law all but killed formal declarations of war, replacing them with authorizations of the use of military force. The United States hasn’t had a declaration of war since.

A majority of lawmakers in both parties will argue than an AUMF is more than sufficient. After all, it puts lawmakers on record, asserts the power of the legislative branch, and makes lawmakers feel as if they are abiding by the Constitution.

The founders, however, never mentioned an AUMF in the Constitution. They understood that war was serious business and should not be started with shortcuts. Yet this is exactly what an AUMF is: a gimmick created by Congress to avoid the unpleasantries of an official declaration of war.

The need for the rigor imposed by a real war declaration has been exacerbated in recent decades by administrations that too often default to unilateral uses of armed force as the preferred solution to troubles abroad.

Congress is finally beginning to reassert its prerogative on war and peace. Members in both parties are slowly arriving at the realization that the imbalance of power between the executive and legislative branches is becoming dangerous to the constitutional republic our country’s architects so brilliantly conceived. There have been more discussions in the last year about curtailing the president’s ability to launch a conflict than the previous decade.

But if Congress genuinely wants to take back its power, it should spend less time pontificating and more time getting back to the basics. That includes ditching the AUMF for the formal declaration of war — a process that focuses the public’s attention and unites the country in what is always a deadly serious undertaking. It tells the world, the taxpayers, and our own troops that the entire country has thought this through, and we are in it for the long haul.

Our lawmakers ought to show the same courage and commitment to their jobs that our young men and women in uniform and their families show in theirs.

Retired Maj. Gen. Jeff Phillips is a 37-year veteran of the U.S. Army, where he served in operational, communications, and logistic staff positions from battalion through Army headquarters. He is a fellow at the American College of National Security Leaders.

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