Earlier today, Congress voted on two Libya resolutions: One to authorize military intervention, the other to restrict the U.S. to support operations. Both failed.
Neither Congress, nor the president has covered themselves in glory on this issue. Obama disregarded the views of the Office of Legal Counsel and several of his top lawyers in concluding that operations in Libya were not "hostilities" under the War Powers Act. In the final desperate hours before the vote, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton stooped to the kind of "us against them" rhetoric reminiscent of the Bush administration, stating "[T]he bottom line is, whose side are you on? Are you on Qadhafi’s side or are you on the side of the aspirations of the Libyan people and the international coalition that has been created to support them?" Like Bush it seems, Clinton apparently believes that questioning the strategic wisdom of American military interventions civil war is tantamount to siding with the enemy.
The political unpopularity of the intervention gave Congress an opportunity. For decades presidents have chafed against the War Powers Act, and as Scott Lemieux has pointed out, Congress has failed to live up to its responsibility to rein in the executive branch. The result is that presidents grow ever bolder in asserting the unilateral authority to use military force, even absent the approval of Congress. Democrats and Republicans alike seemed to finally believe that Obama had gone too far.
The failure of both votes however, reveals precisely why so much warmaking authority has been ceded to the president: Congress doesn't want the responsibility. The House wanted to be able to say it rebuked the president and an unpopular war by voting down authorization--but it also didn't want to take responsibility for forcing an end to operations. What makes this even more cowardly is that the bill certainly would have died in the Senate, where there is bipartisan approval for the operation--the vote would have been largely symbolic. Congress didn't have the wherewithal to take responsibility even as an act of symbolism.
The success of either vote would have been better than this outcome--one way or another, the message that the president shouldn't go to war without congressional approval would have been sent. Here we find the limits of spite as a motivation for congressional action--dissing Obama was more of a priority than ensuring compliance with the law. So rather than serving as a warning to Obama's successors not to disregard Congress when using force abroad, future presidents will be even less concerned with asking for Congress' permission in starting wars.
