Why won't Congress vote on war?

Kaine’s point is pretty simple: The United States has been bombing since Aug. 8, 2014. The president initially said there’d be no “boots on the ground.” Now there are American special forces on the ground; the president suggests that doesn’t count, only armored divisions and infantry columns would count.

In any case, that’s 16 months of military action, during which time the United States has launched more than 6,692 airstrikes, destroyed more than 16,075 targets and spent $5.2 billion supporting those military actions — that’s $11 million a day. We’ve also had four service members lose their lives.

That looks and feels a lot like a war. Whether it’s an effective war is another question, but if you’re consistently bombing somebody for more than a year, and the commander-in-chief goes on national television to say he intends to keep on bombing, that sure seems like a war.

Yet the constitution is quite clear: “The Congress shall have power . . . to declare war.” So why hasn’t it?

That’s a question Kaine was asking well before the United States even took military action — and has been asking ever since. The national legislatures of Great Britain, France and Germany have voted on taking military action. Even Vladimir Putin thought it a diplomatic nicety to have his rubber-stamp parliament take a vote. But the United States Congress? Nothing.

Well, almost nothing. The Senate Foreign Relations Committee did pass a resolution last December authorizing the use of military force — co-sponsored by Kaine, a Democrat, and Arizona’s Jeff Flake, a Republican — but it died when that Congress adjourned. President Obama sent Congress his own proposed authorization in February. Nothing.

In his Oval Office address on Sunday, Obama again called on Congress to vote: “If Congress believes, as I do, that we are at war with ISIL, it should go ahead and vote to authorize the continued use of military force against these terrorists. . . . I think it’s time for Congress to vote to demonstrate that the American people are united and committed to this fight.”

So why won’t Congress vote?

The answers are both simple and not so simple.

The simple answer goes like this: Democrats don’t like to talk about war and Republicans don’t want to do anything that looks like they’re supporting Obama — even on something that should be as bipartisan as fighting terrorism.

It’s a lot easier to criticize the president for not doing enough than actually vote on war — and then have some responsibility for what happens. For all of their criticisms of the president’s strategy, the reality is most Republicans are really proposing more of the same, just with more bellicose rhetoric.

Ted Cruz told a crowd this weekend: “We will carpet-bomb them into oblivion. I don’t know if sand can glow in the dark, but we’re going to find out.” Really? Surely he’s not proposing to use nuclear weapons, is he? And carpet-bomb what, exactly? Raqqa is not Dresden. It’s not an enemy capital; it’s an occupied city. We didn’t carpet-bomb Paris to liberate it during World War II, so why would we blithely kill 220,000 innocent civilians here? That will make us safer, how?

Rooting out terrorism may be somewhat more complicated than simply dropping more bombs.

Only Lindsey Graham has an actual plan — send in 20,000 ground troops — but not even other Republicans want to go that far. That explains the not-so-simple reason Congress hasn’t voted. What, exactly, is it voting on?

How broad or how narrow a resolution would it pass? The Kaine-Flake resolution sets a three-year limit and spells out that “the use of significant U.S. ground troops in combat against ISIL, except to protect lives of U.S. citizens from imminent threat, is not consistent with such purpose.” Graham, though, says he wants no such limits on military action.

Interestingly, there does seem to be a rising chorus calling for a congressional vote — and it’s coming from both sides. Hillary Clinton recently reversed her position, and called for an authorization. The most interesting voice on the right is that of a first-term Republican congressman from Minnesota — Tom Emmer.

He’s called for a straight-up declaration of war — something Congress hasn’t done since World War II.

This is where the lawyers — and possibly the accountants — come in. There’s one legal view that says, umm, you can’t really declare war against something that isn’t a formal nation-state — and we don’t want to grant terrorists that status. Emmer says that’s nonsense. “The Islamic State calls itself a state,” he says. “It should be treated as one. Not because it calls itself one, but because it controls a lot of territory. By some estimates, 10 million people wake up every morning in the Islamic State.”

Emmer says an “authorization for the use of military force” is “Washington speak.” The constitution says war, so let’s vote on war and not play word games. He says the only other argument he’s heard against a formal declaration of war is that it would trigger certain provisions in some insurance policies. “Really?,” he says. “That’s what we’re going to argue about? As IS gains ground and beheads people, we’re going to argue about insurance?”

Emmer is a straightforward kind of guy. “This is about Congress agreeing with the president that these evil animals need to be dealt with.”

Even his qualifying language is straightforward: “This has nothing to do with Islam. Islam’s an excuse. These are soulless people. This is all about power, which is what it has been since the beginning of time.”

Cato eventually got his wish; Carthage was destroyed. For now, Kaine — and Emmer, each in his own way — simply want Congress to vote on whether to destroy something.