War Powers: Tim Kaine gives them hell
Virginia Sen. Tim Kaine continues to give his colleagues unshirted hell (to use Doug Wilder’s excellent turn of phrase). And well he should.
Members of Congress are full of bright ideas about beating back the Islamic State. Some of them talk a mighty fine game. But when it comes to actually authorizing specific military action, they study the tops of their shoes.
On Thursday, Kaine took the Senate floor to make some pointed remarks about the National Defense Authorization Act that has been under debate.
“There are many important provisions in the NDAA that affect our national security,” he noted. “In addition to grand items, the NDAA also examines in some excruciating detail some very, very fine points. ... The NDAA includes provisions dealing with storage facilities that are needed to help us combat rust on military vehicles, the transmissions systems that are used in some Army land vehicles, the reflective markings in lights that are used on military airfields, one particular military barracks that has sewage, mold, hot water, and rodent problems. And even in the NDAA, we deal with some details of West Point’s football program.
“While Congress is very willing to debate and vote on all things great and small concerning our military, there is one thing that we don’t want to debate or vote on: whether the United States should be at war; whether we should be at war with ISIL. We’ll vote on shipbuilding. We’ll vote on military pensions. We’ll vote on vehicle rust. And we’ll vote on barracks mold. But we don’t want to vote on whether or not the nation should be at war. Madam President, I proposed ... that we should have an authorization debate about whether we should be at war with ISIL, and the amendment that I proposed was ruled non-germane.”
Kaine closed by asking his colleagues to “bring the same amount of attention and bipartisanship to debating whether we should send American troops to war as we are willing to apply to barracks mold and vehicle rust.”
If they have any sense of duty left, Kaine’s speech should have left his fellow senators red-faced with shame. We have a grim suspicion it did not.
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