Presidential War Powers vs Congress’s Role: April Topic Analysis

Resolved: The United States should eliminate the President’s authority to deploy military forces abroad without Congressional approval.

Introduction

The current topic covers a wide range of time periods: past, present, and future. In the past, the Founding Fathers distributed powers among the executive, legislative, and judicial branches in an effort to establish a system of checks and balances, ensuring that no branch gains too much power to promote a balance that protects against tyranny. However, over the span of several presidential administrations, including the current Trump administration, authority has increasingly shifted away from the legislative branch and towards the executive branch. Recent and ongoing military operations, such as the airstrikes on Iran and the extraction of Venezuelan president Nicolás Maduro, highlight the president’s deployment of military forces abroad. While the future remains uncertain, Trump’s threats to take Greenland and other future conflicts could involve a similar use of presidential war powers. 

Historical Background

In the Constitution, Article I, Section 8 outlines congressional powers, which include declaring war and raising armies. Sometimes also known as the “Declare War Clause,” this section of the Constitution grants what some interpret as offensive military authority to Congress. In Article II, Section 2, the Founding Fathers establish the role of the president as the “Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States” who has the authority to respond to sudden attacks in order to protect Americans abroad. While not explicitly stated in the Constitution, the president’s inherent authority to repel sudden attacks constitutes more reactionary, defensive military authority. Congress has not formally declared war since WWII, meaning that many US military operations after WWII, such as the Korean War, were presidentially authorized and oftentimes not approved by Congress. 

In 1973, Congress passed the War Powers Resolution which aimed to impose limits on presidential war powers. It mandates that in the absence of congressional approval, military forces must be withdrawn within 60 days unless the President gains congressional approval to continue and the President must write a report to Congress within 48 hours of the operation. Created in the waning years of the Vietnam War, it was designed to check presidential power, catalyzed by Nixon's unauthorized, secret bombing campaigns in Cambodia without congressional authorization and the prolonged, costly war in Vietnam. While presidents have submitted over 130 reports to Congress and it is often cited, the War Powers Resolution of 1973 is rarely successfully used to force troop withdrawals, as presidential administrations tend to argue over its constitutionality and find loopholes, such as a lack of ground troop presence in limited operations like airstrikes, to justify military operations lasting longer than the allowed period. 

Aff Arguments

US military operations carry numerous inherent risks that make congressional approval another important layer in the process of weighing the benefits and the risks of each operation. Some of these risks include loss of human life on all sides, escalation of limited military operations to prolonged, costly conflict, and the regime-changing tendencies of US intervention that often creates numerous other issues. One past example of the escalation of military operations is in the Vietnam War, where following the Gulf of Tonkin incident, the U.S. moved from providing advisory support to active combat operations. Recently, some analysts predicted that current military operations in Iran could escalate into another “forever war” if the Iranian regime proves to be more entrenched and robust to attack. On the subject of regime-change, it often backfires due to the creation of power vacuums and political instability when leaders are removed, fueling civil wars and humanitarian crises. Recent examples of attempted and ongoing regime change include Trump’s extraction of the Venezuelan president and his recent calls to be involved in the selection of Iran’s new leader. 

Another strong argument that the affirmative can make is that Congress must limit presidential powers to restore balance to the three branches. Given many of Trump’s actions and policies, which often involve presidential overreach, the affirmative can easily frame the status quo as one plagued by misuse and overreach of presidential powers. Some examples of Trump’s overreach include his tariffs, which the Supreme Court ruled against, freezing $4.9 billion in congressionally approved foreign aid, and his attempts to dismantle independent agencies. If the affirmative team can prove that affirming will not only limit presidential war powers, but will also shift power back into a state of balance, they can access a wide range of impacts, such as mitigating the negative effects of some of Trump’s policies and preventing democratic backsliding in the US.

Neg Arguments

On the negative side, one link that has the potential to branch out into numerous different arguments is that Congress is slow and indecisive, which hampers the effectiveness of military operations and response times. Military operations are often time-sensitive and require quick reaction times, not the slower, more deliberate processes that occur in Congress in order to pass bills. When President Obama asked Congress in 2013 to authorize strikes on Syria after the Assad regime deployed chemical weapons, the bill never received a vote because Congress could not agree on whether to or how to authorize them, despite broad bipartisan support. As a result, Obama eventually sent troops to Syria without Congressional approval, relying on the authorizations of military force (AUMFs) of 2001 and 2002 for legal justification. 

The negative team can argue that Congress’s slow reaction time would undermine US deterrence abroad, impacting allies and leading to the proliferation of bad actors. Allies can no longer trust the US for protection if they see that Congress is unreliable and time-consuming, and without credible deterrence, bad actors will proliferate, left unchecked by failing US deterrence. However, the negative team must be aware of affirmative turns, where the affirmative team could argue that US deterrence is declining due to Trump’s unpredictable behavior, which necessitates the implementation of the resolution.

Concluding Remark

In order to gain a better understanding of this topic, debaters should explore topics such as presidential unilateralism and constitutional debates over presidential war powers. By framing the debate as a question of necessity or abuse of power, both teams can increase the persuasiveness of their arguments. One last recommendation is for debaters to follow news daily related to the topic. Conflicts such as Iran are constantly evolving and will continue to shape the topic as new evidence emerges, and the war powers push in Congress, which was recently shot down this week. A useful resource is the War Powers Reporting Project, which has a comprehensive list including past presidential reports of military actions and details of military operations under the War Powers Resolution of 1973.

Read more here:

• Wex Definitions Team, Cornell Law School

• James Chater, Toby Mann, BBC

• Isaac Yee et. al., CNN

• Damian Murphy, Robert Benson, Center for American Progress

• Founding Fathers, National Archives

• Congress, Constitution Annotated

• Bill Barrow, PBS

• CRS, Congress

• Erica H. Ma, NULR

• Nixon Library

• Office of The Historian, US Department of State

• Holly Ellyatt, CNBC

• Invitation, The Economist

• Julia Manchester, The Hill

• Lawrence Hurley, NBC News

• Josh Boak, Federal News Network

• Lauren McFerran, Celine McNicholas, Economic Policy Institute

• Frank Langfitt, NPR

• Josephine Walker, Axios