Trump’s War With Iran Isn’t Just Reckless. It’s an Impeachable Abuse of Office. |
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President Donald Trump thrust the United States into a war against Iran last weekend without bothering to secure congressional approval or even pretending to identify a legal basis for his actions. This administration, of course, has already declared a freewheeling authority to commence hostilities in foreign nations without a greenlight from the legislative branch. But this new conflict pushes Trump even deeper into dictatorial territory: He now asserts a freedom to disregard constitutional limits on his war-making authority and thrust the country into a potentially protracted military campaign that will only end on his say-so. This theory of executive supremacy leaves American armed forces at the whim of one man—a total inversion of our constitutional design.
On a special Slate Plus extra episode of Amicus, Mark Joseph Stern spoke with Eugene Fidell about Trump’s startling claim of unilateral war powers. Fidell—a visiting lecturer and senior research scholar at Yale Law School and expert on the law of armed conflict—has argued that the president’s actions constitute not just a flagrant abuse of office but an impeachable offense. A preview of their conversation, below, has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Mark Joseph Stern: Trump’s attack on Iran is different from his recent military action in Venezuela; this time, he is openly calling it a war, which it clearly is. So the first question is: Under the Constitution, does the president have the power to declare war?
Eugene Fidell: The answer, of course, is no. The Constitution has always provided that the power to declare war is vested in Congress. You either have a declaration of war, which we haven’t seen since the day after Pearl Harbor, or its equivalent, which is an authorization for the use of military force. We’ve had a few of those. We’ve also had a lot of attacks that administrations of both parties have claimed were not war in the constitutional sense, because they were extremely short-lived, limited, low horsepower, low firepower operations. But the basic concept in the Constitution is that it is for the Congress, as a whole, to declare........