After last night’s strikes on Iran, Democrat politicians reached screeching levels of hypocrisy over Donald Trump’s decision to act rather than wait for an Iranian nuclear weapon deployment. Chuck Schumer demanded action from Congress, as did Hakeem Jeffries. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez led calls for impeachment. Practically every Democrat on Capitol Hill — with the notable exception of John Fetterman — rushed to promote their “authoritarian” narrative about Trump.
All of this venting reveals very short memories on the port side of Capitol Hill. Fourteen years ago, they couldn’t get enough of presidential strikes on a nation in the very same region. Remember Hillary Clinton’s chortling over the fall of Moammar Qaddafi and the role she and Barack Obama played in it? “We came, we saw, he died,” she raved to Leslie Stahl after a joint US-EU bombing campaign decapitated Qaddafi’s regime, and left a failed state in its wake:
In March 2011, Obama ordered a series of military strikes on regime targets in Libya, not because of a clear and present danger to US security or assets, but because of a “responsibility to protect” doctrine promoted by Samantha Power. The Qaddafi regime was brutally suppressing dissent at the time, as Qaddafi had done for decades, but Qaddafi had also cooperated with the West on nuclear non-proliferation. Nevertheless, Obama and the Left wanted Qaddafi gone, and without going to Congress conducted military attacks with the express purpose of collapsing his regime in favor of the rebels in and around Benghazi — a bitter irony, in the end.
Obama never even bothered to formally report the action to Congress, as required under the War Powers Act, with the lame excuse that he ordered the strikes to support the action led by NATO. At the time, Harold Koh argued that the War Powers Act didn’t apply because of the limited nature of the conflict — which had been going on for three months at that point — and the administration’s interpretation of the word “hostilities” in the act. As long as US ground troops weren’t involved, Koh argued, the president had full authority and no responsibility to notify Congress at all, Koh argued.
Democrats then blocked a Republican effort to order the end of Obama’s use of military assets in the operation. Congress eventually refused in June 2011 to authorize the operation’s continuance past the 60-days-plus-30 limit in the Wat Powers Act, which Obama then ignored. He continued to order military action in Libya until October, when Qaddafi finally got pushed out of power and killed in the streets of Tripoli. And Democrats, led by the chortling Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, cheered Obama’s initiative.
The wisdom of that operation is not the issue here. Neither is the wisdom of last night’s operation, although the Iranian nuclear-weapons program certainly has far more connection to American security than Libyan rebels did in 2011. The issue at hand the hypocrisy of those who cheered the 2011 operation, but who now insist that such use of American military forces without Congress’ approval is somehow illegal or unprecedented.
Jonathan Turley points out the ludicrous nature of the Democrat outrage in calling it “the Claude Rains School of Constitutional Law“:
Yesterday, I wrote a column in the Hill discussing how Trump is unlikely to go to Congress in launching an attack on Iran and how he has history on his side in acting unilaterally. The column noted that many Democratic politicians and pundits who were supportive of such unilateral actions by Democratic presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama are suddenly opposed to Trump using the same power. It is the Claude Rains School of Constitutional Law where politicians are “shocked, shocked” that Trump is using the authority that they accepted in Democratic predecessors. …
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pushed for unilateral attacks during the Obama Administration. She dismissed the need to consult, let alone secure authorization, from Congress. In March 2011, Clinton testified that there was no need for such consultation and declared that the Administration would ignore a 60-day limit on unauthorized military actions.
Obama also defied the War Powers resolution on Syria. He actually did ask for congressional authorization to take military action in that country in 2013, but Congress refused to approve it. He did it anyway. Despite Congress expressly denying”authorization for the introduction of United States Armed Forces,” both Obama and Trump did precisely that.
Trump has informed Congress of the action, which satisfies the WPA for the moment. Turley also points out that Trump still has his 60-days-plus-30 to continue to act before he has to ask Congress for specific authorization to continue:
Even under the WPA, Trump would have 60 days to prosecute this war and another 30 days to draw down forces without congressional approval. The court, in Campbell v. Clinton, noted that even if Clinton violated the WPA by continuing operations after the 60-day period, he was technically in compliance by withdrawing forces before the end of the 90-day period.
Professor Turley got to it before I did, but let’s give all of these performative Democrat hypocrites the Captain Louis Renault Award here, too. Maybe they should get Hillary and Koh on a few TV shows to explain why targeting a non-hostile despot for annihilation without Congressional approval is A-OK but eliminating a nuclear-weapons program from a regime who made “Death to America” its slogan and its operational action for 46 years somehow doesn’t qualify. I’d love to hear that argument. Don’t we have a “responsibility to protect” Jews from genocidal madmen — and Americans as well? Using Samantha Power’s formation of R2P in Libya, why shouldn’t Trump go on to use military action for the express purpose of regime change so that he can chortle out a lame version of Julius Caesar’s quote about Ali Khamenei?
I’d really love to hear an explanation of the difference. Really really. Meanwhile, here are your winnings at the casino, Democrats.
Addendum: I’m not advising that Trump escalate this to regime change. Again, this is not about the wisdom of policy, but about the absurd hypocrisy of cheering on Obama while threatening impeachment of Trump for doing the exact same thing, with lots more justification.
