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War Powers

Remembering the Bay of Pigs: Law and Covert War

Matthew Waxman   Tue, Apr 16, 2019, 8:00 AM

Tomorrow is an ignominious anniversary. On that date in 1961, about 1,400 American-trained Cuban exiles launched a secret invasion of Cuba in an effort to overthrow the Fidel Castro regime. After landing on the island’s southern coast at the Bay of Pigs, the invading guerrillas were routed by government forces. The humiliating disaster gave rise to a rare, publicly available Justice Department analysis of presidential power to wage covert war.

War Powers

Remembering Eisenhower’s Formosa AUMF

Matthew Waxman   Tue, Jan 29, 2019, 8:34 AM

On this date in 1955, President Dwight Eisenhower signed a congressional joint resolution authorizing military force to protect Formosa, as Taiwan was then called by the U.S. government, and surrounding islands. It’s one of the most interesting force authorizations in American history: It reflected Eisenhower’s complicated ambivalence toward constitutional powers, it was open-ended, it contemplated the possible use of nuclear weapons, and it was never actually invoked.

War Powers

Remembering the Ludlow Amendment

Matthew Waxman   Thu, Jan 10, 2019, 8:00 AM

Few people today have ever heard of the Ludlow Amendment—a radical proposal that would have required a popular referendum before Congress could declare war and which lost a critical House vote on this date in 1938. The proposal was the closest the United States ever came to formally amending the Constitution’s allocation of war powers, and it would have revised them in exactly the opposite direction in which their interpretation has evolved in practice since the amendment’s defeat.

War Powers

NATO and War Powers: Remembering the ‘Great Debate’ of the 1950s

Matthew Waxman   Wed, Jul 11, 2018, 6:30 AM

As President Trump goes into this week’s NATO summit complaining about burden-sharing, amid inflamed anxieties at home about presidential powers over foreign relations, it is worth remembering the “Great Debate” of the early 1950s. That dispute pitted President Harry Truman and Secretary of State Dean Acheson against congressional NATO skeptics, and it concerned whether the president could unilaterally deploy four additional U.S. Army divisions to Western Europe.

War Powers

Document: White House Letter of Notice to Congress on Syria Strike

Matthew Kahn   Tue, Apr 17, 2018, 10:07 AM

The White House has released the following text of a letter sent to the speaker of the House and president pro tempore of the Senate to serve as notice of military engagement in Syria on April 13, consistent with Section 4(1) of the War Powers Resolution.

Dear Mr. Speaker: (Dear Mr. President:)

War Powers

War Powers and the Su-22 Episode: Third-Party Defense of Coalition Partners

Robert Chesney   Tue, Jun 20, 2017, 9:51 AM

Early Sunday evening, a US Navy F/A-18 Super Hornet shot down a Syrian Air Force Su-22 that had just completed a bombing run targeting US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) in the Raqqa region. The episode raises important questions under the U.N. Charter (see Adil Ahmad Haque’s analysis here). But what about U.S. domestic law?

War Powers

Toward Transparency of Legal Position and Process and a White House Obligation to Disclose

Bob Bauer   Wed, Apr 12, 2017, 1:47 PM

A White House’s responsibility to explain the legal basis for military actions such as the Syria missile strikes is dangerously undefined. This is not a problem unique to the Trump Administration. Nor do the differences between administrations in the choice, the structure, or timing of transparency fall out exclusively among party lines. What has emerged is a transparency regime shaped largely by broad discretion and perceived political necessity.

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