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Democratic Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, after trying for 10 years, is on the cusp of getting Congress to repeal the authorizations that led the US into war against Iraq in the early ’90s and again in the early ‘00s.
Along with a Republican, Sen. Todd Young of Indiana, Kaine has support from the White House and a bipartisan coalition. He and Young told CNN’s Jake Tapper about their proposal on “The Lead” on Thursday.
I had more questions for Kaine – the most important of which is what repealing these authorizations would actually accomplish since both have fallen into disuse.
It is another authorization for use of military force, or AUMF, passed in 2001, that has kept the US military busy in multiple countries.
My phone conversation with Kaine, which has been edited for length – and which includes a history lesson about pirates – is below.
WOLF: From your perspective, give people a brief overview of war powers. What can the president do, and what should Congress be doing?
KAINE: This was one of the most carefully debated parts of the Constitution, as the Convention was writing it in 1787.
One of the reasons it was so carefully debated was that they were doing something intentionally very different from other nations, which had tended to make initiation of war a matter for the king, the emperor, the monarch, the executive.
Article 1 basically says that Congress has to declare war by vote. Congress also has the budgetary power to fund government, including defense.
Article 2 makes the president the commander in chief. The presumption is Congress votes to initiate, but then the worst thing that you could have is 535 commanders in chief. So once there’s a vote to…
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