The AUMF: Obama fails to get Congress on his side

If you were watching the recent Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the Obama administration’s draft proposal for an Authorization for the Use of Military Force (AUMF) against the Islamic State, you could be forgiven for doubting whether Congress will pass a new resolution.  Secretary of State John Kerry, Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Martin Dempsey appeared unable to convince the committee on some of the most basis (but critical) questions: what does “enduring” in “enduring offensive combat operations” mean; how long are U.S. ground troops allowed to operate before being pulled out; how long can the campaign expect to last; and would the President have the authority to expand military operations beyond Syria and Iraq?

The most basic question, however, is does this debate over the AUMF even matter, given that President Obama has already ordered close to 3,000 airstrikes over the past eight months?

{mosads}Before February 11, 2014, the White House was able to bypass all of these issues by arguing that the President had all of the authority he needed under the 2001 AUMF.  For the most part, hawkish Republicans were sympathetic to this argument; the 2001 AUMF, after all, provided the Commander-in-Chief with virtually unlimited power to launch airstrikes and ground operations against ISIL targets.  The administration’s decision to submit an ISIL draft resolution was largely a political choice by the White House to get the entire Democratic caucus in the House and Senate off their backs. 

If the administration thought that passing a new resolution through both chambers was going to be a simple formality, they were terribly premature.   

From the day the ISIL AUMF draft was delivered to Capitol Hill through the Foreign Relations Committee hearing that was held on March 11, President Obama has simply failed to persuade any lawmaker in a position of seniority that his approach is the right one.  The “intentionally fuzzy” language in the resolution, as White House Press Secretary Josh Earnest has referred to it, has created far more questions for members of Congress than answers.  In fact, the draft is not only getting picked apart by lawmakers, but trashed as insufficient to the monumental task at hand or so vague to render any limits on military force irrelevant.

Republicans like Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Bob Corker (Tenn.) and Sens. John McCain (Ariz.), Lindsey Graham (S.C.), and Marco Rubio (Fla.) are vastly disappointed that Obama intentionally limited his own authority to conduct a war that every serious national security expert in the United States labels a top-tier challenge.

“[T]he authorization for the use of military force that has been sent up is one that is limited in some ways, both in duration and relative to the activities that the commander in chief…can carry out.” Corker stated in his opening remarks.  “[W]hat that does on this side of the aisle is put Republican senators in the position of looking at a limited authorization…that, in some ways, ratifies a strategy…that many people do not believe is effective.” 

Lawmakers in the president’s own party, in the meantime, take a diametrically opposing perspective; in the minds of Democrats, the AUMF draft places far too much powerful in the hands of the Commander-in-Chief, token oversight power in the hands of Congress, and a degree of wiggle room that could, in the words of Ranking Member Robert Menendez (D-N.J.),  holds “the potential for large numbers of U.S. troops to be deployed in Iraq and Syria.”

In a way, you have to feel sorry for Obama and his staff.  After delaying for the first six months of the military campaign, the administration finally decided to do the right thing — submit a formal AUMF proposal over to the Hill.  Yet, in doing so, the administration has opened up a debate that has once again devolved in a partisan fight about whether the White House truly understands the threat that ISIL poses, and whether the executive branch sincerely wants the peoples’ representatives to weight in.

Under questioning, Kerry intimated that passing a resolution along party lines would be “absolutely” worse than passing no resolution at all.  If yesterday’s hearing is any guide, Kerry may get his wish.

DePetris is an analyst at Wikistrat, Inc., a geopolitical consulting firm, and a contributor to the Atlantic Council’s Rafik Hariri Center for the Middle East.