WASHINGTON — National security law experts, testifying before the House Armed Services Committee on Thursday, faulted President Barack Obama’s proposed authorization for the fight against the Islamic State, saying it adds more presidential authority for waging war.
Obama offered the new authorization for the use of military force, or AUMF, as a conciliatory gesture to those who have criticized the administration’s reliance on authorizations from 2001 and 2002 to fight an entirely different enemy. But rather than replacing the old authorizations, the new AUMF provides an additional legal tool for waging war.
Robert Chesney, associate dean for academic affairs at the University of Texas School of Law, told the committee that concerns over the restrictiveness of the new authorization are misplaced as long as the 2001 AUMF remains active. “To summarize the matter bluntly, the administration’s draft fails — and intentionally fails — to address the relationship between this new authorization and the 2001 authorization,” he said. “The result is that its authorities are, optics notwithstanding, simply additive with respect to presidential authority.”
–
“We shouldn’t treat this as if it has to cover all contingencies,” Schiff told The Huffington Post. “It’s not like the president can never come back to Congress and ask for a new authorization. Unless the Congress wants to legislate itself into irrelevance in war-making power, we shouldn’t provide an open-ended war authority that may outlast all of us.”
In his closing remarks, Chesney told the committee, “If I have one message for this committee, it is to think about this new authorization within the old one. Otherwise you end up talking about restrictions that really aren’t restrictions. You end up doing all kinds of things you don’t mean to be doing, or you don’t know you are doing.”
