Congress still hasn’t authorized military action in Syria, but in the long term, the impact of President Biden’s strikes on his Iran strategy may be more consequential than the debate they’ve renewed over executive war powers.
The airstrikes President Joe Biden ordered against Iran-backed militias in Syria on Thursday night are reigniting a longstanding dispute between the White House and Congress over the limits of presidential war powers. The Pentagon and National Security Council say the strikes, which targeted facilities near the Syria-Iraq border and killed at least one militia member, were authorized as part of the president’s constitutional duty as commander-in-chief to protect U.S. forces and were a proportional response to recent rocket attacks on U.S. bases in Iraq. “The targets were chosen to correspond to the recent attacks on facilities and to deter the risk of additional attacks over the coming weeks,” White House press secretary Jen Psaki said on Friday. Naturally, an old tweet of Psaki’s immediately came back to haunt her: Also what is the legal authority for strikes? Assad is a brutal dictator. But Syria is a sovereign country. Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris, like Psaki, are on the record questioning the legal basis of airstrikes that former president Donald Trump ordered in 2017 and 2019. Critics right and left jumped on these statements to accuse the administration of hypocrisy. Several Democratic members of Congress, including senators Tim Kaine and Chris Murphy and Representative Ro Khanna, criticized the airstrikes and demanded that Congress be briefed on the matter. “Congress should hold this administration to the same standard it did prior administrations, and require clear legal justifications for military action, especially inside theaters like Syria, where Congress has not explicitly authorized any American military action,” Murphy stated. As these strikes were retaliatory and not in response to any imminent threat, Murphy argued, they were not legal without specific congressional authorization. Biden is now the third president to order attacks in Syria without congressional approval since the start of that country’s civil war almost exactly a decade ago. Former president Barack Obama sought Congress’s permission to intervene and punish Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad for the use of chemical weapons against civilians in 2013, but that resolution never got a vote. The Obama administration proceeded to claim the 2001 Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF), which launched the Afghanistan War and the “War on Terror” writ large, and the 2002 AUMF for the Iraq War, as its legal justifications for intervention in Syria.
