When President Barack Obama wanted to bomb Syria in 2013 following reports that Bashar al-Assad was using chemical weapons on his own people, Rep. Tim Walz, D-Minn., who represented a rural district in southern Minnesota, went to a local grocery store.
Walz stood outside the store and asked everybody that came out whether they supported bombing Syria. Every single person said no.
“He was clearly stunned because he told us that story the next time we talked to him,” said Cathy Murphy, president of the Minnesota Peace Project, which has lobbied Walz on a range of foreign policy issues over the years. “It’s like, ‘The people in my area, they do not want more war.’ And that really impacted the way he voted.”
During his time in Congress, Walz, now at the top of the Democratic ticket as Vice President Kamala Harris’s running mate, was a vocal advocate against a new war in Syria and evolved into a strong defender of congressional war powers. He ran for the House in 2006 on an anti-Iraq war platform, was active in multiple efforts to prevent the U.S. from waging a new war in Syria, and co-sponsored every war powers resolution aimed at imposing congressional authority on the U.S. role in the war on Yemen, among other pieces of legislation related to American intervention abroad.
Walz and Harris constitute the first presidential ticket in U.S. history to be unified in support of key legal interpretations that have significant implications for war powers. Since the debacle of the Iraq War, Democrats have staked out stronger positions against the Bush administration’s notion of unchecked presidential powers to make war. As Obama took power, however, the administration undertook a program of more limited adventurism but never renounced the claims of expansive powers it inherited through Bush administration precedents.
Walz and Harris, on the other hand, took on-the-record stances in favor of using legislation to limit those powers.
They were both early supporters of the Yemen War Powers Resolution, which directed the president to remove U.S. troops from hostilities “in or affecting” Yemen. The War Powers Resolution of 1973 was passed to reassert Congress’s constitutional role in deciding whether to go to war. Under the Vietnam-era law, the president can’t send troops overseas into hostilities unless it has been authorized by Congress.
The 2019 Yemen war powers resolution went on to become the first since the advent of the law to pass both chambers of Congress. (Harris also voted for an Iran war powers resolution following President Donald Trump’s assassination of a top Iranian military commander.)
In addition to opposing various interventions, Walz has, for his part, also supported efforts to revoke and reissue more........