Oh, No. The War Powers Posse Comes After President

Some members of Congress are up in arms over a briefing by a senior administration lawyer who told them the Trump administration had no intention of adhering to the War Powers Resolution concerning the continued interdiction marketing campaign against Venezuelan drug cartels. According to the Washington Post, T. Elliot Gaiser, head of the Trump administration’s Office of Legal Counsel, said the administration did not imagine the strikes met the definition of hostilities under the law and didn’t intend to search an extension of the deadline nor Congress’s approval of ongoing motion.

Heads popped. “The administration appears to be blowing through the 60-day limit,” said a senior congressional aide

• Brian Finucane, former legal adviser to the State Department and now senior adviser for the U.S. program at the International Crisis Group. “It’s a wild claim of executive authority.”

I actually have no thought who Finucane is when he is up and has his trousers on, but he appears to have some degree of self-importance, at least.

• “In any normal administration, somebody would be fired for this kind of abuse,” said Virginia Sen. Mark R. Warner, the rating member on the Senate Intelligence Committee.

• “The administration is, I believe, doing an illegal act and anything that it can to avoid Congress,” said New York Rep. Gregory W. Meeks, the rating member on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, 

• “The last word that I gave to the admiral [that would be Rear Admiral Brian Bennett, the Navy’s Deputy Director for Special Warfare] is I hope you recognize the constitutional peril that you are in, and the peril you are putting our troops in,” threatened Massachusetts Democrat Seth Moulton, who is of no significance.

Not to be undone, some weaker Republicans also had to get in on the show.

Sen. Roger Wicker (Mississippi), the top Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, joined in a uncommon bipartisan rebuke the same day. He and his Democratic counterpart, Sen. Jack Reed (Rhode Island), made public two letters they both had despatched to the Pentagon weeks before, requesting legal paperwork, assault orders and a checklist of targets. The Defense Department, they wrote, had exceeded the quantity of time required by law to present some of the supplies.

Let’s be clear. The War Powers Resolution is a joke. It is facially unconstitutional from its premise that Congress is the super-duper commander-in-chief of the armed forces when it claims “The constitutional powers of the President as Commander-in-Chief to introduce United States Armed Forces into hostilities, or into situations where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances, are exercised only pursuant to (1) a declaration of war, (2) specific statutory authorization, or (3) a national emergency created by attack upon the United States, its territories or possessions, or its armed forces.” That has not been true since President George Washington despatched the U.S. Army and Lieutenant Colonel Josiah Harmer to run the Indians out of the Northwest Territories.

The law was imposed on a scandal-weakened Richard Nixon, and since that time, both presidents and Congress have pretended it has the power of law. A president has invoked it on only one event. President Gerald Ford did so on May 15, 1975, in conjunction with the SS Mayaguez Incident, and the next U.S. Marines assaulted Koh Tang Island. It was not complied with for the invasions of Grenada and Panama, or the intervention in Yugoslavia.

Congress has used the War Powers Resolution twice to power an end to fight. Both occasions, the president was very joyful to go along with the fiction that Congress had ended the battle. The first time was the end of U.S. involvement under President Reagan in Lebanon in 1983. Reagan signed the War Powers Resolution limiting U.S. involvement to 18 months, but he did so saying, “while he agreed with the resolution to authorize force, he could not ‘cede any of the authority vested in me under the Constitution as President and as Commander in Chief of United States Armed Forces’.” 

The second time was getting Bill Clinton out of Somalia in 1995. Notably, in conjunction wth Clinton sending troops to Haiti, he said, “[l]ike my predecessors of both parties, I have not agreed that I was constitutionally mandated to get” congressional approval for a navy motion.

Congress tried to use the War Powers Resolution to power President Trump to end involvement in Yemen and Iran; President Trump vetoed both resolutions (right here | right here).

The backside line right here is that presidents of all events have ignored the War Powers Resolution besides when it was politically advantageous to concentrate to it. Trump stiff-arming his political enemies shouldn’t be the same as breaking an unenforceable law. The War Powers Resolution is not used because it’s just about not possible to power a president who opposes it to go along with it. The commander-in-chief doesn’t reply to Congress on navy operations. If Congress objects, then it might probably stop funding the operation. Finally, the War Powers Resolution is blatantly, facially unconstitutional. Everyone is aware of that, and the rationale no one in Congress has ever sued to have it enforced is that they know how that film ends. 

Given every part about the issue, one actually wonders why the Democrats are going after Trump so exhausting to depart the drug cartels alone when, by all accounts, it’s overwhelmingly widespread. I imply, unless money was concerned in some way.

Poll: 71% of Americans assist Trump’s strikes on boats smuggling medicine https://t.co/UDOT20FyCM

— John Solomon (@jsolomonReports) October 10, 2025

On this issue, I believe President Trump is true on two major factors. First, there are no “imminent hostilities.” Second, the law doesn’t think about a battle happening in worldwide waters:

1) into hostilities or into conditions where imminent involvement in hostilities is clearly indicated by the circumstances;

(2) into the territory, airspace or waters of a overseas nation, while geared up for fight, besides for deployments which relate solely to provide, alternative, restore, or training of such forces; or

(3) in numbers which considerably enlarge United States Armed Forces geared up for fight already positioned in a overseas nation;

If any of the people whinging about this subject are that upset, they will introduce a decision, go it through both the Senate and the House, have President Trump veto it, and then override his veto. The last factor President Trump ought to do is cede any govt energy to this assortment of nincompoops who actually do not care if Americans get killed, but they care a great deal about damaging President Trump.

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