Authorization for Use of Military Forces - The Presidential Blank Cheque to Declare War

As we know, the men that framed the U.S. Constitution were aware that putting the power to declare war in the hands of one man was dangerous.  As such, delegates to the 1787 Constitutional Convention specified that only Congress has the power to declare war under Article 1 Section 8 as shown here:

"The Congress shall have power…

To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water;

To raise and support armies, but no appropriation of money to that use shall be for a longer term than two years;

To provide and maintain a navy;

To make rules for the government and regulation of the land and naval forces;

To provide for calling forth the militia to execute the laws of the union, suppress insurrections and repel invasions;

To provide for organizing, arming, and disciplining, the militia, and for governing such part of them as may be employed in the service of the United States, reserving to the states respectively, the appointment of the officers, and the authority of training the militia according to the discipline prescribed by Congress." (my bold)

Under Article II Section 2, the President of the United States of America:

"...shall be commander in chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the militia of the several states, when called into the actual service of the United States."

Congress, even with the powers available to it, has not declared war against any foreign nation since 1942.  That begs the question, how is it that the United States has ended up at war in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan and Iraq if Congress has not declared a state of war?  In 1973, Congress enacted the War Powers Resolution (aka the War Power's Act) as reflected in Title 50, Chapter 33, Sections 1541 to 1548 in the aftermath of the Vietnam War debacle, which states that:

1.) the collective judgement of both Congress and the President will apply to the introduction of U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities.

2.) the President must consult with Congress before introducing U.S. Armed Forces into hostilities or situations where hostilities are imminent.

3.) the President must comply with reporting requirements when he introduces U.S. Armed Forces into existing or imminent hostilities, for example, within 48 hours, he must submit in writing a report to the Speaker of the House and the President of the Senate a report outlining the circumstances necessitating the introduction of U.S. Armed Forces and the scope and duration of the involvement. 

The goal of the 1973 War Powers Resolution was to retake the power to declare war away from the President and put it back into the collective hands of Congress.

Unfortunately, the Executive Branch found yet another way around the law.  On September 18, 2001, one short week after the attacks of September 11th, Congress passed Public Law 107-40 which states the following:

Note that Congress, through the new Authorization for Use of United States Armed Forces (AUMF) in Section 2 states that :

"...the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harboured such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons."

In this case, the AUMF was targeting nations, groups and individuals that were seen as supportive of the September 11, 2001 attack on U.S. soil.  This AUMF was initially used to invite Afghanistan and to justify the American attack against the Taliban and al Qaeda and basically put all of the power to declare war into the Oval Office.

Again, in 2002, House Joint Resolution 114 was passed and became law.  Once again, this Authorization for Use of Military Force (AUMF) was enacted, this time, with a specific target; Iraq.  Among other things, it authorized the following:

"Authorizes the President to use the U.S. armed forces to: (1) defend U.S. national security against the continuing threat posed by Iraq; and (2) enforce all relevant Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq."

With that background on how declarations of war can now be undertaken when a President utilizes an Authorization for Use of Military Forces (AUMF), let's look briefly at a study by the Congressional Research Service showing how AUMFs have been abused since 2001 and used as a justification for military operations in nations that are not even part of the September 11th terrorist attack.  According to the authors of the study, there have been 37 occurrences where the administrations of either George W. Bush or Barack Obama disclosed publicly that they had referred to the 2001 AUMF in connection with initiating or continuing military actions, including detentions and military trials.

Here is a partial list of the 18 occurrences when AUMFs were used during the Bush Administration:

September 24, 2001 - deployment from Central and Pacific Command

October 9, 2001 - combat action in Afghanistan

September 20, 2002, March 20, 2003 and September 19, 2003 - combat and deployment action in Afghanistan, Philippines, Georgia, Yemen, Djibouti, conducting detention operations in Guantanamo Bay, maritime interception operations in the Central and European Command areas

March 20, 2004 - continuing combat operations in Afghanistan, continuing detention operations in Guantanamo Bay, working with friends and allies around the globe, continuing operations in Georgia, deployment to Djibouti, Kenya, Ethiopia, Yemen and Eritrea, maritime interception operations in the Central, European, Northern, Pacific and Southern Command areas

November 4, 2004 - added military operations in Iraq to aforementioned operations

There were additional AUMF occurrences in May 2005, December 2005, June 2006, December 2006, June 2007, December 2007, June 2008 and December 2008.

In total (up to May 2016, the date of the CRS report), there were 19 occurrences during the Obama Administration, most of which include the operations outlined in the Bush occurrences.  These notifications took place in June 2009, December 2009, June 2010, December 2010, June 2011, December 2011, June 2012, December 2012, June 2013, December 2013 and June 2014.  The September 23, 2014 notification included a new target as shown here:

This is how the President was able to justify the use of U.S. forces in the battle against ISIS.

Basically, thanks to Congress and its 2001 Authorization for the Use of Military Forces, three presidents have now been given the power to engage U.S. military personnel in overseas campaigns under the guise of the fight against global terrorism.  As though this were not enough, a new 2018 version of the original AUMF has been introduced to replace the 2001 and 2002 versions which would allow the president to order the use of military force against the Taliban, al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria along with:

1.) al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula

2.) Al Shabab

3.) al Qaeda in Syria including Al Nusrah Front

4.) the Haqqani Network

5.) al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb

It also allows the president to order military operations in "new foreign countries" which means countries other than Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Yemen or Libya.

As you can see from this posting, the original framers of the Constitution clearly wanted to reign in the powers of the president when it came to declaring war.  Since the attack of September 11, 2001, Congress, through the use of Authorizations for the Use of Military Forces, has abdicated its responsibility for declaring war, giving the president a blank check when it comes to ordering U.S. military personnel into combat.

Approving and Disapproving of President Obama

Updated October 31, 2012

In stumbling around on the internet, I found this rather interesting graph from Real Clear Politics showing President Obama's approval rating history:

Right now, 49.7 percent of those polled approve of the job that President Obama is doing while 47.3percent disapprove.

Let's look back in time for a minute, noting the small graph below the main graph which shows net approval and disapproval.  When Obama took office, 63.5 percent of Americans approved and only 19.3 percent disapproved for an overall net approval of 44.2 percentage points when subtracting the disapproving from the approving.  That net approval rating was as good as it got.  Obama's approval rating peaked at 65.5 percent on February 17, 2009 however, with his disapproval rating rising to 25.5 percent, his net approval fell to 40 percentage points.  By February 27, 2010, the number of Americans that approved of his performance and those that disapproved met at 47.3/47.2 percent for the first time.  On March 18th, 2010, the number of Americans that disapproved of his performance rose above the number that approved for the first time, yielding a net approval rating of -0.5 percentage points.  Oddly enough, this is around the point that the global economy hit its post-Great Recession peak, unfortunately, the same could not be said for the American economy.  To put things into perspective, this is what the unemployment rate in the United States looked like at the time:

We were just one month and 0.2 percentage points short of the worst monthly unemployment rate since the 1981 - 1982 recession.

The current President's net approval rating remained negative between July 22, 2010 and January 9, 2011, hitting a nadir of -6.4 percentage points on August 16, 2010.  Obama's longest stretch in the opinion penalty box fell between July 17, 2011 and February 4, 2012; his net approval rating hitting a new low of -10.2 percentage points on August 30, 2011.  Since July 2010, the President's overall net approval rating has been negative (in red) for a far longer period than it has been positive (in black) as shown here:

Since February 2012, the President's overall approval rating has been modest at best with a maximum net approval of +3.5 percentage points (keeping in mind the current Administration's rather quick response to the Hurricane Sandy issue thus far) and a maximum net disapproval rate of -2.2 percentage points as shown here: 

Despite the fact that the housing market is showing signs of recovery, GDP is growing at positive albeit modest rates and headline unemployment data has dropped from its peak of 9.9 percent to its current level of 7.8 percent, the current President seems unable to convince voters to approve of his performance.  From this data alone, it certainly appears that November 6th will be a very, very tight race.

Presidential Debt Accumulation - And The Winner Is...

Updated May 14, 2013

A little over a year ago, I posted an article that looked at the last ten Presidencies and examined which Presidents were the most fiscally responsible by looking their record of adding to the national debt.  Now that we're back to reality and facing the so-called "fiscal cliff" and hitting the debt ceiling yet again, I thought that it was time for a new look at whether Republicans or Democrat presidents have historically been at the top of the political heap in America when it comes to presiding over deficit spending.  Note that for the purposes of this posting, I have used the new debt ceiling of $16.4 trillion for President Obama.

I looked back over the past 50 years at the debt issues that faced the last 10 administrations.  For my source material, I took data from the Treasury Direct website and used their very handy monthly search function to examine the debt history for the years and months in question.  To ensure that you understand how I used the numbers, for example, for the beginning of President Nixon's term as the President, I took the debt recorded on January 31st, 1969 as linked here.  Since there is not a daily breakdown that gives us an accurate debt figure for January 20th, 1969, the debt at the end of President Johnson's term was assumed to be the debt figure recorded for January 31st, 1969 just as it was assumed to be the debt figure for the beginning of President Nixon's term.  Where Presidents did not finish their terms (i.e. JFK), I used the debt to the end of November 1963 as his final debt number as in the case of Nixon.

Here's the chart showing the Presidents in chronological order with the debt (all debt figures in billions of dollars) at the beginning of each President's term, the debt at the end of the term, the amount in nominal dollars by which the debt grew, the total percentage that debt grew over the President's full term and the length of the President's term (in years and months expressed as a decimal):

Note that I also threw in a somewhat less commonly used but more accurate growth calculation, the compound annual growth rate or CAGR.  This shows the compounded growth rate of the debt accrued each year over the entire term of a given President if the growth rate was steady over every year of his term as defined using this equation:

Here is the same data but placed in order of compound annual growth rate from least to greatest:

Lastly, here is the same data but placed in order of the size of percentage increase in debt from least to greatest:

It's surprising to see that, despite the massive arms buildup related to both the Cold War and the Vietnam War along with growing expenditures for the space race, that both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations come in with the lowest compound annual growth rate.  As well, the same factors plus the added costs of a very poor economy (think Middle East oil crisis) affected the Nixon era and yet, the compound annual growth rate of the debt was less than half its current level.  Not surprisingly, a few years of budget surpluses in the later 1990s helped the Clinton administration keep debt growth to a paltry 37 percent over its entire tenure in the White House.

I was taken back by the fact that the Reagan administration had, by a wide margin, the largest overall growth in debt as a percentage and using the compound annual growth rate.  During the eight-year term of Ronald Reagan, the debt grew by a massive 188.84 percent or a compounded annual growth rate of 14.18 percent.  While many Democrats blame the Bush II administration for debt accumulation, the compounded annual growth rate is actually firmly in the middle of the pack.  The same cannot be said for the Bush II additions to the nominal debt (second highest) and overall debt growth rate over the entire term (also second highest).  President Obama now has the distinction of having broken the record for the highest nominal debt increase, however, as a percentage increase, he is sitting in third place after Presidents Reagan and George W. Bush.  When using the measure of compound annual growth rate, the current President is in fourth highest place.

It is interesting to look back at the last 50 years and see where America's debt problem began to blossom and under which Administration the debt saw its greatest growth.  I realize that Congressional issues enter the equation, however, it is the President that represents the Administration's overall attempts to achieve some sort of fiscal balance.