I put together my thoughts at Slate. Incidentally, in the course of doing research for this piece, I ran across a large number of awfully confident claims that Obama’s decision to ask Congress for consent to use military force in Syria in 2013 meant that he, and possibly no other future president, could ever use military force unilaterally again. It did not take long for these claims to be falsified. All of the quotations below are taken from pieces written back in 2013.
Whatever happens with regard to Syria, the larger consequence of the president’s action will resonate for years. The president has made it highly unlikely that at any time during the remainder of his term he will be able to initiate military action without seeking congressional approval.
President Obama’s decision to seek authorization for military intervention in Syria is a watershed in the modern history of war powers…. The rest of the world can basically forget about the US going to military bat in these kinds of situations if congressional action is a precondition. This is a huge development with broad implications not just for separation of powers but for the global system generally.
In seeking congressional authorization, President Obama is thus re-submitting the modern presidency to the kind of “cycle of accountability,” to use Professor Griffin’s phrase, that the constitutional design anticipated. We will strike Syria, if at all, based on a joint determination by both elected branches that should nurture an ongoing sense of joint responsibility to monitor and assess in a careful way whatever consequences ensue.
In the NYT today I predicted that the President would be eating his words from the 2008 campaign trail to the effect that he needed congressional authorization for an intervention like the one planned for Syria. I was wrong, and I am very happy to say that I am now eating my words.
But not me.
President Obama’s surprise announcement that he will ask Congress for approval of a military attack on Syria is being hailed as a vindication of the rule of law and a revival of the central role of Congress in war-making, even by critics. But all of this is wrong. Far from breaking new legal ground, President Obama has reaffirmed the primacy of the executive in matters of war and peace.