It seems President Trump has aroused heightened interest in the exercise of Congress’s constitutional powers in war and peace. In a 366–30 vote this week, the House of Representatives passed a nonbinding resolution declaring the U.S. military’s role in Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen unauthorized. That’s a start. Even more promisingly, a growing group of Senate Democrats is pushing legislation that would prohibit any use of funds for “military operations in North Korea absent an imminent threat to the United States without express congressional authorization.”
Though it merely makes more explicit something that ought to be fully understood under the Constitution, sponsors of the bill have understandable motivations here. President Trump has repeatedly claimed that he does not need Congressional authorization to initiate military action. In April, he demonstrated his commitment to this unlimited view of presidential war powers when he ordered missile strikes against a Syrian airbase in the absence of any credible claim of preemption and without legal authorization from Congress.
Two months earlier, the president gave an indication that he would not seek Congressional authorization or approval in potential military action against North Korea. In a press conference in February, when asked about it, he insisted, “I don’t have to tell you what I’m going to do in North Korea.”
In the ensuing months, the president has exacerbated the tensions between the United States and North Korea. In addition to taunting and ridiculing via his Twitter account, Trump has also made bold public threats. “North Korea best not make any more threats to the United States,” he told reporters in August, or “they will be met with fire and fury like the world has never seen.”
Adding to the heightened tensions, National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster has gone so far as to say the regime in Pyongyang is undeterrable. This is remarkably out of step with what the bulk of the academic literature says on the question, but it is also destabilizing in that the logical conclusion of such an assessment is that we must initiate a full‐scale attack on North Korea. After all, if Pyongyang possesses nuclear weapons and doesn’t care about regime survival, traditional deterrence isn’t an option.
Senator Bob Corker (R‑TN), who, as chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee would be the one to shepherd the legislation to a vote, said last month that Trump is treating the presidency like “a reality show,” and his rhetoric could set the nation “on the path to World War III.” To the extent that Trump’s advisors act as a check on the president’s erratic foreign policy inclinations, Corker added, they “separate our country from chaos.”