Throughout history, presidents and congresses have jockeyed for control over war powers. Article I of the Constitution grants Congress the exclusive authority to declare war, while Article II names the President as “Commander in Chief” of the army, navy and militia. The jockeying reached a watershed moment of congressional assertiveness with the passage of the 1973 War Powers Act. Since then, however, presidential war-making power has been in a state of near-constant expansion—an expansion only accelerated by overseas counterterrorism actions and recent presidential military actions in Libya and Syria.
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The White House has provided a letter to Sen. Bob Corker detailing the Trump administration's legal analysis of the basis for airstrikes conducted in Syria in May and June 2017. The letter is available in full below.
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?
Project Democracy has filed suit under the Freedom of Information Act to obtain the President's legal justification for his administration's strikes against a Syrian airbase.
A few weeks ago, AFRICOM quietly brought to an end a five-year-old combat-equipped deployment that for a time had raised some very interesting War Powers Resolution questions.
The President's responsibility to explain the legal basis for military actions such as the Syria missile strikes, and the process used to formulate that legal basis, is dangerously undefined.
With six hours to spare before the 48-hour deadline in section 4 of the War Powers Resolution, the White House has sent the President's report to Congress on Thursday evening's missile attacks on Syria.
The text is here:
THE WHITE HOUSE
Trump's airstrikes in Syria represent unilateral presidential war initiation, and the Founders would have unanimously held that the action was unconstitutional.
The origins and implications of the legal basis for the Syria strike.
What legal authority for the use of force will President Trump assert for the missile attack against Syrian forces under domestic and international law?
We have released a new paper, forthcoming as a chapter in the Cambridge Companion to the United States Constitution, which takes on the tensions created by these features of American constitutionalism and presidential practice in the national security area.