My friend Gene Healy eviscerates the planned AUMF in his piece Obama’s ISIS AUMF: Codifying “Mission Creep.” Congress should take a hard look at the president’s request before committing American lives and money to another foreign entanglement. Healy writes:
What little congressional debate we’ve seen so far on the president’s new war hardly smacks of “Profiles in Courage.” Still, the draft AUMF approved by the lame-duck Senate Foreign Relations Committee last December, flawed as it was, made for a far better starting point. It imposed a three-year sunset on the 2001 AUMF, applied new transparency requirements, and at least tried to provide limits on ground combat beyond a few flexible adjectives. If Congress is going to retroactively authorize the president’s latest war, they ought to reclaim some of the control they’ve ceded, not blithely delegate still more power. As I argue in greater detail here, “the 114th Congress should pick up where the SFRC left off, and impose additional limits on presidential authority.” Adopting the Obama AUMF as-is would amount to signing another blank check.
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Read this and six more great pieces from Cato Institute here:
- The Real Climate Terror
- Spinning Global Sea Ice
- Removing EITC and Child Tax Credits for DACA/DAPA recipients and Non-Citizens
- Obama’s ISIS AUMF: Codifying “Mission Creep”
- Our New Cybersecurity Strategy: An Acronym Firewall
- The Libertarian Mind Available at Many Retailers
- Why Businesses Migrate from Greece to Bulgaria: Smaller Government Is Cheaper
