Sen. Tim Kaine: Congress Shouldn’t Allow Broader ISIS War Without Vote

“The president shouldn’t be doing this without Congress,” Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., said Tuesday of strikes against the Islamic State group, and “Congress shouldn’t be allowing it to happen without Congress.” Otherwise, Capitol Hill is embracing the policy of preemptive war favored by former Vice President Dick Cheney that it rejected back in 2001, right after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, he said at a Center for American Progress Action Fund event.

Kaine, who is pushing a bill to authorize a narrow use of military force against the Islamic State group (also known as ISIS or ISIL), said Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Robert Menendez, D-N.J. (@SenatorMenendez), would consider his bill among several such proposals when it returns from its current recess, and then hold a vote.

Kaine (@timkaine) criticized Congress for abdicating its responsibilities. In 2001, Congress passed an Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the perpetuators of 9/11 or any country that harbored them, a law since used for a long list of anti-terrorism activities. Back in 2001, Congress rejected even broader language that then-President George W. Bush and Cheney sought. And emotions were running higher then than they are now. Still, the 2001 authorization was written fairly broadly — and Congress is about to go back to the Bush administration’s original language by not forcing a vote on the ISIS war, Kaine said.

“After 13 years of war, of learning lessons we should have learned, of living under an authorization that we drafted that was 60 words long without geographical limitations, without temporal limitations, that the administration says might justify war for another 25 or 30 years — why would we want to ever further the precedent that, ‘You know what? Congress should’ve voted for the preemptive war,’” Kaine said.

Kaine also criticized President Obama — saying that as a candidate, he had a far less expansive view of the president’s constitutional authority to wage war, and even referring to his stance last year that the 2001 AUMF needed to be eventually repealed. Kaine said that discussion, to revisit the 2001 AUMF, is only getting started.

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