Reps. Gabbard and Jones are right, presidential wars should be an impeachable offense

By SAL RODRIGUEZ | letters@ocregister.com | Orange County Register

PUBLISHED: July 20, 2018

Editor’s note: Breaking views are thoughts from individual members of the editorial board on today’s headlines.

This week, Reps. Tulsi Gabbard, D-Hawaii, and Walter Jones, R-North Carolina, introduced a resolution to define “presidential wars not declared by Congress…as impeachable ‘high crimes and misdemeanors’…”

H.Res. 922 would prevent the president from “perpetuating ongoing wars or supplying war materials, military troops, trainers, or advisers, military intelligence, financial support or their equivalent in association, cooperation, assistance, or common cause without first receiving congressional authorization.”

Violations of this would be grounds for impeachment under resolution.

It’s one of the better ideas I’ve heard – and an important call for ending America’s perpetual wars.

Over the past two decades, the United States has been involved in numerous military conflicts around the world, often with no formal congressional authorization.

In pursuit of a vaguely defined “war on terror,” the United States federal government has wasted trillions of dollars, further indebting the nation for future generations to deal with, sent thousands of Americans to their deaths for wars of questionable value to American national security and killed hundreds of thousands of people.

It is time for Congress to reassert its constitutional authority over war making and put an end to the executive branch’s ability to deploy American military resources into conflicts that haven’t been explicitly authorized by Congress.

“We are here today because Congress is not meeting its constitutional responsibility,” said Jones. “If Congress does not debate sending your son or daughter to fight for this country, then we don’t need a Congress anyway. Nothing is more sacred or important than sending a man or woman to die for this country.”

“Since 9/11 alone, our country has spent trillions of dollars on interventionist regime change wars, costing the lives of many Americans, taking a toll on our veterans, and causing people in our communities to struggle and suffer due to a lack of resources,” said Gabbard. “Our bipartisan resolution aims to end presidential wars, and hold Congress accountable so it does its job in making the serious and costly decision about whether or not to send our nation’s sons and daughters to war.”

Gabbard, it should be noted, is one of the most principled and consistent critics of American interventionism in Congress. She has opposed the undeclared war in Syria, as well as the United States’ disgraceful support for the Saudi war in Yemen.

Though I don’t expect Congress to suddenly find the spine it’s lacked for some time, Jones and Gabbard raise important facts the mainstream media and political establishment have been keen on ignoring and overlooking.While the establishment and mainstream media served as mindless cheerleaders for entry into countless conflicts over the past two decades, they’ve been nowhere to be found since the pretenses which led us into so many conflicts faded away.

This should not be a partisan issue. George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Donald Trump have all been guilty of perpetuating a failed interventionist foreign policy which undermined the role of Congress in war making. Of course, Bush had plenty of apologists in his day, the anti-war left all but disappeared under Obama and Trump’s base is…quite devoted to Trump, to put it mildly.

But presidents aren’t kings, the Constitution grants Congress, not the president, the power to declare war. If the president can’t get congressional approval for wars abroad, then it’s not a war worth getting involved in. If the president, whoever that is, can’t respect that, then they should be impeached and ultimately removed from office.

Sal Rodriguez is an editorial writer and columnist for the Southern California News Group. He may be reached at salrodriguez@scng.com

https://www.ocregister.com/2018/07/20/reps-gabbard-and-jones-are-right-presidential-wars-should-be-an-impeachable-offense/