Dems’ hypocrisy on war powers revealed in response to Trump’s Iran strikes.
After last night’s strikes on Iran, Democrat politicians reached screeching levels of hypocrisy over Donald Trump’s decision to act rather than wait for an Iranian nuclear weapon deployment. Chuck Schumer demanded action from Congress, as did Hakeem Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led calls for impeachment. Practically every Democrat on Capitol Hill — with the notable exception of John Fetterman — rushed to promote their “authoritarian” narrative about Trump.
All of this venting reveals very short memories on the port side of Capitol Hill. Fourteen years ago, they couldn’t get enough of presidential strikes on a nation in the very same region. Remember Hillary Clinton’s chortling over the fall of Moammar Qaddafi and the role she and Barack Obama played in it? “We came, we saw, he died”, she raved to Leslie Stahl after a joint US-EU bombing campaign decapitated Qaddafi’s regime, and left a failed state in its wake:
In March 2011, Obama ordered a series of military strikes on regime targets in Libya, not because of a clear and present danger to US security or assets, but because of a “responsibility to protect” doctrine promoted by Samantha Power. The Qaddafi regime was brutally suppressing dissent at the time, as Qaddafi had done for decades, but Qaddafi had also cooperated with the West on nuclear non-proliferation. Nevertheless, Obama and the Left wanted Qaddafi gone, and without going to Congress conducted military attacks with the express purpose of collapsing his regime in favor of the rebels in and around Benghazi — a bitter irony, in the end.
Obama never even bothered to formally report the action to Congress, as required under the War Powers Act, with the lame excuse that he ordered the strikes to support the action led by NATO. At the time, Harold Koh argued that the War Powers Act didn’t apply because of the limited nature of the conflict — which had been going on for three months at that point — and the administration’s interpretation of the word “hostilities” in the act. As long as US ground troops weren’t involved, Koh argued, the president had full authority and no responsibility to notify Congress at all, Koh argued.
Democrats then blocked a Republican effort to order the end of Obama’s use of military assets in the operation. Congress eventually refused in June 2011 to authorize the operation’s continuance past the 60-days-plus-30 limit in the Wat Powers Act, which Obama then ignored. He continued to order military action in Libya until October, when Qaddafi finally got pushed out of power and killed in the streets of Tripoli. And Democrats, led by the chortling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, cheered Obama’s initiative.
The wisdom of that operation is not the issue here.
