The Congressional Assault On Trump’s War Powers

Curt Mills

Domestic Politics, United States

McConnell's amendment rebuking Trump is approved by the Senate.

“Trump will be remembered for overseeing a dramatic weakening of the presidency—it’ll be back to Andrew Johnson days,” a prominent conservative close to the White House says.

Such is the sentiment among many of the president’s allies who back his proposed withdrawal in Syria and pullback in Afghanistan. The president, albeit inconsistently, has his priorities. But he is routinely stymied by his own knife-fighting subordinates and fellow partisans in Congress.

With the announcement by Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell this week that he will offer up an amendment to a Middle East policy bill, the senior senator from Kentucky has set the stage for an informal rebuke of the commander-in-chief. “The text of McConnell’s amendment is neoconservative,” writes John M. Donnelly in Roll Call.

McConnell is arguing that America cannot take its “foot off the gas” and must sustain the “strategies that are clearly working.” Another administration ally and veteran Republican activist characterized the attempt as the most forceful break by McConnell with Trump since he’s become president. And it has the making of the widest riff between McConnell and administration-friendly populists since McConnell’s war on former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon in 2017.

It is likely that McConnell, not National Security Advisor John Bolton, is the most ardent opponent of Trump’s new strategy yet. And this unwelcome development for the White House comes just as the president was served a stinging political defeat by the head of Congress’ other branch, Nancy Pelosi.

A parallel development: the McConnell row again has forced Trump into the corner of Kentucky’s junior senator Rand Paul. Senator Paul has a political understanding with McConnell—the majority leader endorsed Paul for president in the early days of the 2016 campaign—but they part company on foreign policy.

A core issue for many is McConnell’s use of the word “precipitous” to characterize American withdrawal from the region—laughable for critics of the war who note Afghanistan is now America’s longest war. “It is ludicrous to call withdrawal after 17 years ‘precipitous,’” Paul said Thursday, appearing on Fox News to rally the base to the president’s defense.