An Obama Ally Parts With Him on War Powers

ORANGE, Va. — In June, after he had written a scorching opinion article seeking to constrain the president’s unilateral power to make war, Senator Tim Kaine of Virginia, one of Barack Obama’s earliest supporters, buttonholed the commander in chief at the White House for what he called “a spirited discussion.”

The militants of the Islamic State were pouring across the Syrian border into Iraq, and seizing cities where so much American blood and treasure had been spilled. But Mr. Kaine said he told the president in no uncertain terms that if he intended to go to war, he would have to ask Congress’s permission. President Obama politely but firmly disagreed.

They have been battling ever since.

Mr. Kaine is an unlikely leader in the fight between Congress and the White House over a declaration of war. Genial and junior, the former Virginia governor was on Mr. Obama’s short list for the vice presidency in 2008. He became Mr. Obama’s handpicked Democratic Party chairman, then his handpicked senatorial candidate after Senator Jim Webb, a Democrat, announced his retirement in 2011.

But Mr. Kaine established his position in May, when he introduced legislation to repeal the 2002 authorization of force that paved the way for the invasion of Iraq. Then in September, he drafted his alternative, a narrowly tailored resolution to give Congress’s blessing to a war against the Islamic State, with a one-year time limit and explicit language ensuring the mission could not expand, either to ground troops or to other targets.

Mr. Kaine traces his defiance on the subject of war powers to his state’s deep military ties, from the vast Pentagon apparatus to the sprawling bases in Norfolk, but also to Virginia’s unique place in the nation’s founding.

“It’s no surprise, and it’s heartening that a Virginia legislator is taking this back to the foundations,” said C. Douglas Smith, vice president for the Robert H. Smith Center for the Constitution, housed in James Madison’s ancestral home here. “Someone so close to the president, appearing to want to constrain the president, he wants to rise above.”

Mr. Kaine’s beliefs also have roots in the gracious estate of Montpelier, where Madison began drafting the Constitution, and down the road at Thomas Jefferson’s more famous mansion, Monticello, where checks on executive power were nurtured with religious fervor.

“They know I feel strongly about this because I’m a Virginian,” Mr. Kaine said of the White House. “Until we have a vote, and we live by that vote, I am going to keep pushing them hard.”

Even before he was considering a run for the Senate, Mr. Kaine — then Virginia’s governor — was consulting with the leaders of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center of Public Affairs on legislation to replace the War Powers Act of 1973, which some consider toothless. The center’s National War Powers Commission, led by the former secretaries of state James A. Baker III and Warren Christopher and staffed by a who’s who of bipartisan national security veterans, produced its recommendations on re-energizing executive and legislative cooperation on war in 2007, then briefed President-elect Obama in Chicago in 2008 at his request.

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Yet Washington seems no closer to resolving a stubborn question that goes back to the nation’s founding: Which branch of government has the power — and the responsibility — to initiate war, and what responsibilities do the executive and legislative branches have to each other on matters of war and peace?

“Who decides we go to war has been a perennial issue for the entire history of the United States,” Andrew O’Shaughnessy, director of the International Center for Jefferson Studies at Monticello, said as he sat in a gracious office where President Franklin D. Roosevelt mulled plans for D-Day.

It is little wonder that no consensus has emerged in Washington over the need for Congress to authorize military force against the Islamic State, also known as ISIS or ISIL.

House Speaker John A. Boehner of Ohio has suggested that he would be open to a debate and vote on such a resolution, but says the president should ask for it first and send up the language of a war resolution. Representative Nancy Pelosi of California, the House minority leader, indicated she thought a vote should happen after the Nov. 4 elections.

The chairmen of the House Foreign Affairs and Senate Foreign Relations Committees say they are in no rush to move forward. And the Obama administration continues to insist it has all the authority it needs from the 2001 authorization for the use of military force against Al Qaeda after the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

“I could not disagree more,” Mr. Kaine said, adding, “you don’t ask people to sacrifice their lives until the nation has debated and committed to the mission. It’s immoral.”

Then again, the current denizens of Montpelier don’t seem to agree with the inhabitants of Monticello.

“There was no ambiguity,” Mr. Smith said, as he walked the halls of Montpelier, dodging tour groups and students on field trips. “For Madison and most of the founders, they had tremendous consensus that authority to go to war rests with the legislature.”

Thirty-one miles down the route Virginians have dubbed “Constitution Way,” Mr. O’Shaughnessy is not so sure. The United States has declared war only five times in its history, but has deployed military troops across its borders at least 125 times. One of those times was an attack on the Barbary Coast pirates of North Africa, for which Mr. Jefferson did seek Congress’s approval.

But even the scurrilous political environment of his day had nothing on the gridlock of Mr. Obama’s Washington.

“Unfortunately on this issue, history doesn’t give a lot of guidance,” said Mr. O’Shaughnessy, a professorial Englishman.

Mr. Kaine’s tenure as governor was dominated by battles over budgets, transportation and the aftermath of a student’s bloody rampage through Virginia Tech, but once elected to the Senate, he knew he would move to retake the foreign policy and military affairs slots long dominated by Virginians like Mr. Webb, a former Navy Secretary and decorated Vietnam War veteran, and John Warner, a longtime powerhouse on the Armed Services Committee. He took seats on both the Armed Services and Foreign Relations Committees.

He consulted frequently with Mr. Warner, a Republican who wrote the authorization for the use of military force that preceded the first Gulf War. Gerald Baliles, another former governor and now director of the University of Virginia’s Miller Center, tracked Mr. Kaine down in 2007 as he was teaching a law class at the University of Richmond to brief him on the center’s war powers proposal. Since then, Mr. Baliles said, he cannot count how many times the two men have talked on the subject.

“I was sowing the seed, and with Tim, it was fertile soil,” Mr. Baliles said.

Mr. Kaine’s interest in issues of war and peace tugged at Mr. Warner’s loyalties, the retired senator said. Mr. Kaine ran for the Senate in 2012 against George F. Allen, a former governor and senator from Virginia, who had asked for Mr. Warner’s help on the campaign trail.

But Mr. Kaine’s father-in-law, A. Linwood Holton Jr., was Mr. Warner’s college roommate and fraternity brother, who implored him “to treat Tim well,” Mr. Warner recalled.

“I tried to do what I could to help George,” Mr. Warner said with a chuckle, “but I wasn’t on all cylinders.”

Since the election, the 87-year-old Republican patrician and the 56-year-old junior senator have formed a partnership on foreign policy, with Mr. Warner advising Mr. Kaine on war powers and authorization of force, and urging him to keep pushing.

“Kaine was very close to the president, but he courageously went out, and I think properly so, demanded that Congress participate,” Mr. Warner said. “And it’s not over yet. I think this will have a second life.”

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