A fighter with the Kurdistan Workers'; Party (PKK) watches for signs of ISIS foes.
White House Chief of Staff Denis McDonough and White House counsel Neil Eggleston briefed Senate Democrats at a closed-door luncheon Tuesday about a proposed authorization to use military force the administration plans to deliver to Congress Wednesday. The AUMF would set congressional limits on how to carry out the U.S.-led fight against the murderous extremist group that calls itself the Islamic State, and others call by the acronyms ISIS and ISIL.
Reuters, CNN, ABC News and other media outlets have reported that despite extensive consultations between the White House and lawmakers, the disputes over the contents of an AUMF that arose last year are not fully resolved. That's likely to mean weeks of debate and wrangling after the Feb. 16-20 recess and could keep Congress from passing any authorization at all.
Since September, the Obama administration has carried out air attacks on thousands of ISIS sites in Iraq and Syria. About 2,000 U.S. advisers and trainers are in Iraq and another 1,000 are expected to arrive soon. While officials say they are not directly engaging in combat, the chances of that happening are substantial. Other nations, including Iran, have in various ways joined the fight against ISIS, which has most recently been estimated to include 5-6,000 hardcore fighters, about the same number it is said to have had in September when the United States began leading counterattacks in Iraq against it.
Two months ago, on a party-line vote of 10-8 with Democrats in the majority, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee passed an AUMF drafted by then-Chairman Bob Menéndez. The resolution never made it to the Senate floor, however.
Up until December, the administration had shown no eagerness for an ISIS AUMF. But, faced with the prospect of one being passed anyway, Secretary of State John Kerry presented five key points to the committee that the administration said an AUMF should include. Ryan Goodman discusses those here.
In short, the points were: no limiting of combat forces; no geographic limiting for targeting ISIS; restricting the AUMF to ISIS and associated forces; setting three-year sunset provision; and having the AUMF supersede the 2001 "war on terror" AUMF for purposes of fighting ISIS.
Read below the fold for more arguments to expected over the AUMF.
6:43 AM PT (Laura Clawson): The text of the proposed AUMF is here.
A few members on both sides of the aisle, Sen. Rand Paul being the leading Republican in the matter, want to confine any action taken under an ISIS AUMF solely to Syria and Iraq. The White House opposes that idea, as apparently do most Republicans.
The Senate's Republican ultra-hawks don't want limitations on what the president can do in fighting ISIS, with Arizona's John McCain going so far as to say that to do so would be "unconstitutional."
Many Democrats and a small number of Republicans want the AUMF to state firmly that there will be no "boots on the ground in Syria." But, according to sources who were at Tuesday's briefing, the administration's version will state that there will be "no enduring offensive ground operations" as a consequence of the ISIS AUMF. That squint-inducing phrase has already caused dissent.
ABC's Arlette Saenz and Jeff Zeleny report:
“I think there's gonna be a lot of us who are very worried about the open-ended nature of the AUMF. I have no doubt that President Obama is going to maintain his commitment to keep ground troops out of the Middle East, but my worry is that this version of the AUMF will allow for the next president to repeat the mistakes of the past,” Sen. Chris Murphy, D-Connecticut, said. “For many of us it's going to be tough to swallow restriction on ground troops that doesn't seem to be much of a restriction at all.”
“There's really no precedent built up around, you know, the terminology that the administration is going to be using, thus leaving it up to the next president to decide for him or herself,” Murphy added.
Included in the "mistakes of the past" is the 2002 Iraq AUMF, something no doubt weighing on the minds of some Democrats. The majority of House Democrats opposed the resolution. The majority of Senate Democrats supported it. Quite a few, though certainly not all, later publicly regretted favoring it, with some saying they had been bamboozled or misled into doing so by President Bush's claims regarding Saddam Hussein's alleged weapons of mass destruction and supposed connections to Al Qaeda, neither of which were true.
The AUMF that most needs to go, however, is the one passed in 2001 that authorized President George W. Bush to go after the perpetrators of the Sept. 11 attacks. It has been used ever since in a very broad way to carry out the "war on terror." The forever war authorized by that resolution ought to make Democratic senators with a working memory exceedingly circumspect about signing onto any new AUMF, whoever is president.
The administration is reported to be proposing a sunset in three years for the ISIS AUMF and also for the contentious Iraq AUMF. But it proposes to leave intact the 2001 AUMF.
On Tuesday, members of the JustSecurity website sent a letter to President Obama on this subject. Among the editors and writers of the site are several prestigious lawyers, academics and former government officials, including the former legal adviser to the State Department Harold Koh. The letter calls for an end to the 2001 AUMF. It states:
"The 2001 AUMF is already the longest-running use-of-force authorization in history. That statute was directed toward the groups responsible for the 9/11 attacks (al Qaeda and the Taliban), but it has since provided the authority for the use of force against groups with remote connection to 9/11, in places far removed from Afghanistan—such as Iraq, Somalia, Syria, and Yemen. Your administration has interpreted the AUMF to authorize military action against "associated forces" of al Qaeda, such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, and at least one successor organization of al Qaeda, namely ISIL. While we have differing views on the merits of such an interpretation, we are all concerned that there was no serious public or legislative debate before the United States initiated these broader, more extensive military campaigns. […]
An ISIL-specific statute that does not sunset the 2001 AUMF would simply expand the President’s already broad statutory authorities, while doing nothing to ensure public deliberation and congressional accountability respecting significant new military operations."
Two weeks ago, Rep. Adam Schiff, the California Democrat who is the ranking member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, introduced a proposed AUMF in the House of Representatives. The proposal would dump both the 2001 AUMF and the 2002 Iraq AUMF right away. It would not allow U.S. combat troops in Iraq or Syria and the authorization would only cover those two nations, not other places where ISIS might pop up.
If an ISIS AUMF fails to pass both houses, which the odds favor, the Obama administration will continue to say its military actions against the organization are authorized by the 2001 AUMF. As noted, that has effectively been a carte blanche since it was passed.