Trump, Congress, and the solution of war authorities

Two of the interconnected concerns that have caused a general warning regarding the Trump administration involved in the unparalleled executive authority and the erosion of the rule of law. These concerns have intensified discussions about the legitimacy of President Trump’s decision to bomb Iranian nuclear installations for more than a week in the Israel war against Iran. Members of Congress have made decisions to try to prevent Trump from taking such a military action without permission. But the energy that some legislators mobilized for a rare attempt to confirm the constitutional power of Congress against Trump seems to be dissipated, at least while they were expecting a ceasefire between Israel and Iran.

One usually searches for the precedents of the Supreme Court to determine the constitutionality of a presidential procedure. However, there are no issues that provide legal answers about the attacks of attacks such as those in Iran. The only relevant case from the court dates back to the civil war. It states that Congress has the only power “declaring war”, but in the event of the foreign nation invading the United States, the license of Congress is unnecessary and the constitutional power of the president as a great leader to take action. The court noted that the president could not “start the war”, but he never provided a reliable definition of “war”, rather than armed conflict.

Congress has not officially announced the war since World War II, but sometimes the presidents used the use of military force in conflicts known as wars – for example, in Vietnam, the Persian Gulf, Afghanistan and Iraq. But when Congress has not provided any such authorization, presidents often turn to the office of the Legal Adviser of the Ministry of Justice. OLC exports non -binding opinions, but is trying to provide the right limits by law that the president must respect. The presidents have been spent unilaterally to enter the important hostilities on the basis of those opinions, including in the Korean war, in Kosovo, and in Libya.

The Congress, in the 1973 war authorities (who was the right to veto against President Nixon, who was believed to be unconstitutional), aims to verify presidential use unilaterally, and requires, among other matters, that the president consult from Congress before he sent the armed forces to hostile actions and obtain the approval of Congress on the approval of the forces in a conflict more than six days. But Democrats and Republican presidents did not completely comply, and Congress did not do much about it. In recent weeks, some legislators have suggested the decisions of the new war authorities to prevent Trump from attacking Iran again unless Congress declared, but the Speaker of Parliament, Mike Johnson, resisted the idea and announced that the current war decision was a unconstitutional violation of the president’s strength as a leader.

During the past few decades, OLC has produced the opinion after the opinion that was amazingly expanded regarding this force. Every armed conflict that the president pledged without permission from Congress has become a precedent that increases the expansion of what the executive branch considered constitutionally permitted. This is the way we have reached a position in which the president can reasonably claim that it is legal, without the approval of Congress or even consultation, to drop the bombs that penetrate the hidden on a country that did not attack the United States, it may assume that Trump will not care about the race closely. He alluded to the main combinations of the previous OLC opinions, saying that his “targeted in appreciation” Iranian nuclear facilities were “limited in the scope and purpose”, and the ground forces did not include – meaning that the process fits the criteria of what Olick said in the palace from the war, so that the license of Congress was unnecessary.

Trump’s justifications also reflected OLC’s pretexts while maintaining that the president can use military force unilaterally abroad to follow up “national interests” and “collective self -defense”. The office has interpreted “national interests” on a large scale, to include “ensuring food and safe medicine in Somalia”, under the leadership of President Bush I; “An ally or strategic partner”, Iraq, during the era of President Obama; And deterred “the use and spread of chemical weapons” in Syria, during the first period of Trump. And “collective self -defense” does not only mean repelling an imminent attack, but also studying future attacks and defending the allies.

Jacques Goldsmith, an expert in war authorities and professor at Harvard’s Law Faculty, in October 2023, wrote that under the corpse of OLC’s views, “only any circumstance can” can justify the president “from wisdom to use force in the Middle East” justified. The slowing down of Iran’s ability to create nuclear weapons would fulfill the testing of “national interests” as well as “the collective self -defense of our ally, Israel”, as Trump said. Recently, Goldsmith has worried about the fact that “there is no constitutional base that would answer the question” about whether Iran’s strikes are illegal. But some legislators may think that the time has come for Congress to rethink the acceptance of the former executive branch as a unilateral justification for military actions in the future. It is not at least because the leaked primary intelligence report indicates that the Trump attack was not “fully blurred” Iranian nuclear capabilities, if it is proven that it is correct, it may lead him to feel that he is in the “national interest” to try again. (The administration said it may now limit the intelligence that it shares with Congress.)

The courts remain largely outside the discussion of war pimps because these discussions are often considered politics questions instead of legal questions. Therefore, if Congress continues to not verify the president’s use of the army, or even believes that such checks are unconstitutional, its mono power will remain almost unlimited. Before Iran’s strikes, concerns about Trump and the army focused on his unification in the National Guard in California, which justified the administration on the theory that violent incidents between those who protest Ice In Los Angeles turned into a “rebellion” against the United States, the ninth circle found that Trump’s actions were probably agreed with a law stating that the president might take such steps when “unable to implement the ordinary forces to implement the laws of the United States.”

We learn that at home and abroad, the ability to reduce the most dangerous uses depends on the most often on the self -control of the Supreme Leader. The law makes us only until now, or, sometimes, anywhere. ♦