In these increasingly grim Days of Rage and COVID, you have to take your laughs where you can find them, sometimes from unusual sources. It has come to my attention that the Republican Study Committee—the nearly 150-strong caucus of House conservatives—recently released a comprehensive national security strategy entitled, “Strengthening America & Countering Global Threats.” The “product of over 1.5 years of policy development,” this 120-page manifesto is “a conservative, solutions-oriented plan” that “advances the interests of the American people at home and abroad,” according to RSC Chairman Rep. Mike Johnson (R.-LA) and Rep. Joe Wilson (R.-SC).
One of those purported solutions involves constitutional war powers. The RSC report acknowledges that the congressional resolutions the president currently relies upon to wage war—the 2001 and 2002 authorizations for the use of military force (AUMFs)—are “outdated,” have been “stretched,” and therefore “some conservatives may be concerned with increasingly degraded congressional war powers.” What’s needed, the RSC says, is a new AUMF “giving the President sufficient authority to go after terrorist organizations for a definitive length of time without granting vague and indefinite war powers.” But what the House GOP brain trust has come up with would empower the president to wage war in, among other places, Peru, Sri Lanka, Japan, Spain, and—why not?—Northern Ireland. In (God help me) nearly two decades of following the war powers issue, it’s the most ridiculous proposal I’ve ever seen.
Here’s the RSC’s bright idea: replacing the 2001 and 2002 resolutions with “an AUMF that authorizes the President to engage in operations against any currently designated Foreign Terrorist Organization (FTO) that is on the Department of State’s list at the time of enactment.” Granted, it would be nice to have a fixed, public list of terrorist organizations Congress has empowered the president to target. What we’ve got instead is runaway mission creep, as successive presidents have expanded the war on terror to new theaters and new jihadist groups under the rubric of “[Al Qaeda-] associated forces.” Along the way, they’ve been extraordinarily cagey about which groups we’re at war with and which ones we might target next. As a result, nearly two decades after 9/11, the U.S. is engaged in combat operations in some 14 countries, bombing half a dozen of them on a semi-regular basis.
And, true enough, the State Department has a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations that it’s maintained since the late ‘90s, following criteria outlined in the Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996. You can take a look at the FTO list here. It includes some 67 groups in 30 countries.
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