House Democrats passed a nearly $1 trillion appropriations bill Wednesday, repealing the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force.
Part of the bill would restrain the Trump administration from going to war with countries involved in the 9/11 terrorist attacks.
Dailymail.co.uk reports: It’s reasonable to anticipate that Mitch McConnell, the Senate Majority Leader, would not send the version of this bill to the president’s desk – especially since it takes away power from the presidency.
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The Trump administration has signaled it would used the war authority to take military action against Iran, especially after two attacks in the Gulf of Oman on Norwegian and Japanese oil tankers last week that the U.S. intelligence community has confirmed was carried out by the Middle Eastern nation.
Iran also announced earlier this week that within 10 days it would breach the limit of enriched uranium set by the nuclear deal in 2015, another signal of rising tensions between Washington and Tehran.
The AUMF was passed in 2001, three weeks after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and gives the president authority to use ‘all necessary and appropriate force’ against ‘nations, organizations, or persons’ involved in the attacks, and anyone who ‘harbored’ those people.
National Security Adviser John Bolton, who is hawkish on U.S. involvement in foreign affairs, said on Monday that Congress would be making ‘a big mistake if they doubted the president’s resolve on this.’
The war authorization was passed unanimously, who only one lawmaker in the House voting against it, to ‘prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States,’ but it was likely not predicted at the time that it would be used 18 years later to justify military action.
The authority has been used now by three different presidents to engage in dozens of military engagements, but the added provision by Democrats in the appropriations bill would repeal the 2001 AUMF eight months after legislation was enacted.
It may never get to that point though, as Democrats seriously doubt they would go as far as shutting down the government over this measure if Republicans in the Senate struck it down.
‘We are not the party of shutdowns,’ Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told the Huffington Post this week. ‘That is not our position.’
At the end of December 2018, however, both Democrats and Republicans allowed the government to go into its longest shut down in U.S. history when neither side would budge over funding for Trump’s desired border wall.
The 35-day shut down commenced when Nancy Pelosi, who became Speaker in January 2019 when Democrats took back the House, refused to give into Trump’s demands for border barrier funding in a federal spending bill.
The shut down finally ended when Republican conceded and Trump secured funds instead by declaring a national emergency at the southern border.
