All right, y'all, welcome to the Scott Horton Show.
I am the Director of the Libertarian Institute, Editorial Director of Antiwar.com, author of the book Fool's Errand, Time to End the War in Afghanistan, and I've recorded more than 5,000 interviews going back to 2003, all of which are available at scotthorton.org.
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All right, you guys, introducing Robert Naaman, an analyst of American foreign policy and an activist too, and a very accomplished one at that.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Good to be with you.
Happy to have you here.
So listen, I don't want to take up too much of your time this afternoon, it's a Friday and all, but I was hoping that you could talk to us a little bit about the War Powers Resolution going through Congress and just how much bite it does or doesn't have or might or might not have and compare and contrast possibly with the War Powers Resolutions that miraculously Congress passed last spring in order to attempt to bring an end to the war in Yemen, which failed of course because Trump vetoed it.
But anyway, I guess just tell us everything you know and what you think people should do and how they can.
Well so first of all, one of the most important things to understand about this terrain is that it's mostly uncharted and much of the press coverage on these issues tends to make breezy assertions that they don't really know because we're describing something that's uncharted terrain.
So for example, the thing that you referred to about the resolution that passed the House yesterday, if you watch the debate, many of the Republicans said, oh, this is just non-binding, this is blah, blah, blah, and so why are we wasting time with this?
And almost all the press took the Republican side by saying this is a non-binding dispute, non-binding resolution, so it's just symbolic.
That's another thing they always say, merely symbolic, non-binding, blah, blah.
But House Democrats maintain that this is legally binding.
And if you read the War Powers Resolution of 1973, what it says is at any time that the president shall remove U.S. forces from unauthorized hostilities any time Congress so directs with a concurrent resolution.
So the people saying so glibly that this is not binding are like, you know, War Powers Resolution denialists, right?
Like they're denying that Congress passed this law in 1973.
Now refresh my memory, Rahr, I get this so confused.
What was the kind of resolution that they passed on Yemen called?
Resolution in 1973, it created two paths.
One is a joint resolution and the other is a concurrent resolution.
The joint and the concurrent.
Okay, so the joint he can veto.
Exactly.
But then the concurrent, he can't veto, but they say is toothless, so it's a catch-22.
But you're telling me that no, the War Powers Resolution, the law, the War Powers Act essentially, it uses the language concurrent resolution.
But it still means it's veto proof.
And so this is the right one.
This is the one they should have passed over Yemen.
Right.
And we argue, you know, there's all kinds of insider things.
We argued at the time, those of us that were urging the senators to act, we argued for a concurrent resolution.
And they did the joint resolution on the theory, well, there was an issue with it, you know, the Senate parliamentarian wouldn't say that a concurrent resolution was privileged.
And of course, in the Senate, McConnell's the head of it, so you have to make sure that thing is privileged so you can force a vote.
And at the time, the difference, and I think we talked about this on your show at the time, the difference between the two was moot, because if you don't know you're winning, the first step is to get a majority of people who will vote for something.
So we introduced the thing for the first time in March of 2018, and we lost.
We got 45 votes, actually, I can't remember, 47, I can't remember.
But anyway, we didn't get 51.
So it didn't matter because we were losing.
Then in December, it passed, finally, and then it passed both houses after the Democrats took over the House.
And then Trump vetoed it.
That was last year.
That was the middle of last year.
And that was actually the first time in the whole—first of all, this was the first time that this whole juncture ever happened since the War Powers Resolution passed in 1973.
So it was uncharted terrain.
So it was the first time that Congress ever used this mechanism to go all the way with a joint resolution.
And it was the first time that there was a veto, and it was the first time that it failed to override the veto.
It was first of everything because it was the first time we ever got to that thing.
So then, of course, then the question was, what next?
And many of us tried to encourage Speaker Pelosi to go to court.
As you may know, there's a history of members of Congress trying to go to court on the War Powers issue, and they've generally gotten thrown out of court on the issue of standing.
We said this situation—standing means the judge says, I don't have to hear this case because you're just a couple members of Congress, you're not representing the whole Congress.
And also, how come you didn't try and do more as Congress to stop this?
So we argued this is a completely new situation, because now Congress has used this mechanism and has voted against the war.
You can't say that Congress was silent.
They spoke up and they did other things, too.
They tried to stop the arms sales.
And so we said this is a different legal case than any of the legal cases that went before, and we tried to get Speaker Pelosi to go to court, but we couldn't get her to say yes.
And then part of the dynamic at the time was the House had passed amendments on the National Defense Authorization Act to cut off U.S. participation in the war.
And many people said, well, if we can get these amendments passed, that's the gold standard of cutting off the money.
It's in the Pentagon bill.
Trump can't veto that.
So that's where a lot of people put their focus.
As you may know, three weeks ago, four weeks ago, finally, the negotiations concluded and all of our amendments were stripped.
The amendment to defund U.S. participation in the Yemen war, the amendment to defund hostilities against Iran, that was the context in which these recent events happened with respect to Iran, that the effort to stop this in the National Defense Authorization Act was defeated.
So once again, we were in another what, next moment, and this is the moment in which this historic move has happened in the House.
And it was quite contingent.
The first thing that happened was Kaine introduced the resolution in the Senate.
So then we said, which Kaine had never done anything like that before.
And he threatened to do it, but he never done it.
And then in the House, then we said, hey, you know, Tim Kaine, you know, he was Hillary's running mate.
This has got to be safe for anybody now.
And so we asked Ilhan Omar to to introduce a resolution.
And she announced last Sunday, so Sunday of this week, Ilhan Omar announced that together with Barbaralee, they were going to introduce a companion to the Kaine resolution or something similar to the Kaine resolution.
A couple of hours later, Nancy Pelosi announced that she and Alyssa Slotkin were going to do a War Powers resolution.
So it's very clear that Ilhan Omar forced Pelosi's hand.
And so what I was talking with Francis Boyle earlier and he was saying, you know, Slotkin is CIA and this one is, you know, deliberately weakened.
Is that really right?
Well, the deliberately weakened thing.
I don't know that.
In fact, in some ways, the House resolution was stronger.
The Kaine resolution said you have to terminate in 30 days.
Some people objected, saying, like, you know, why 30 days?
This is already unconstitutional.
I don't think Kaine meant anything nefarious by that.
I think it was just like that's kind of the standard language that people use for War Powers resolution.
It's like you have 30 days to get out.
But nonetheless, some people objected to that.
And if you look at the Slotkin resolution, they took the 30 days out.
So it was just immediate.
So in that sense, it's stronger than Kaine.
And another way that it's stronger than Kaine is exactly the thing that we were discussing.
The Kaine resolution is a joint resolution.
Trump can veto it.
The Slotkin resolution is a congress, is a concurrent resolution.
If the Senate passes the Slotkin resolution, that's the end of the road.
It doesn't—Trump can't veto it.
And this is exactly where we get to the question of, is it binding or not?
This has never been tested.
The people who—the people make two arguments.
There's like a really silly argument, a silly claim.
And then there's a not quite so silly claim.
The silly claim is that it's not binding just because it's concurrent.
You know, like the concurrent resolutions are a sense of the Congress, blah, blah, blah.
And that's silly because we have the plain text of the War Powers resolution that says that a concurrent resolution that directs the president to withdraw U.S. forces from unauthorized hostility is binding.
So if the War Powers resolution is law, then that's a silly claim.
The second claim is a little more complicated.
The second claim is that the Supreme Court held legislative veto, which is what this is called, to be unconstitutional in the Chadha decision about a case involving legislative veto and immigration law.
So some people claim that because of that Supreme Court decision, in a different case, the concurrent resolution provisions of the War Powers resolution are unconstitutional.
But this has never actually been tested in court.
So it's just a claim that people have.
It doesn't make it be true.
The only people that can make that be true are nine justices on the Supreme Court or any court.
I mean, ultimately, I'm sure that this issue, if it's ever joined in a court, it's going to the Supreme Court, I would expect, if it's ever joined well.
As I mentioned before, in the past, when people tried like Kucinich on Libya in 2011, when Clinton bombed Yugoslavia, there was a lawsuit.
But each time judges have dismissed it saying, well, you, you know, 10, in the case of Kucinich, it was 10 Democratic and Republican members of the House, the judge said, you guys aren't Congress.
You're 10 members of Congress.
So I don't have to listen to this suit.
So the question has never been tested in court.
So the people claiming that this is unconstitutional are saying something that's not true.
It's just never been tested in court.
So the action by the House yesterday, the possibility it opens and the fact that you had like, you know, Nancy Pelosi and Eliot Engel openly saying, no, this is binding.
Eliot Engel on the House floor read from the text of the War Powers Resolution, the sentence that I just said to you.
Eliot Engel said that on the House floor.
No, guys, come on.
This is what it says in the War Powers Resolution.
And so it opens up the possibility that in in a matter of weeks, maybe this battle will be joined.
Now, right now, things are in flux and I can't tell you exactly what's going to happen because, you know, the House just passed its resolution under the War Powers Resolution.
The Senate should take up the House passed resolution.
On the other hand, Kaine is doing his joint resolution, which Mike Lee announced yesterday at NPR that he's going to co-sponsor that.
And Todd Young, who's another kind of Republican swing vote on these issues, has indicated that he's looking at that.
So the main dynamic here, like if I'm Tim Kaine, the main thing I care about is getting 51 votes, right?
So I'm doing whatever I need to do.
So that means I need all Democrats and four Republicans.
And I've got Rand Paul and Mike Lee, and now I need to get two more.
So if I'm Tim Kaine, I'm doing a joint resolution if that's what I need to get four Republicans.
So we're back to the early March 2018 situation where the first thing is to get 51 senators to vote for something.
Then once you've got that, then you can say, well, OK, now let's make it more perfect.
So that's exactly the situation that we're in now.
A door has been opened to doing something that's never been done before in history, which is for the Congress to direct by concurrent resolution, U.S. removal of forces from hostilities.
And I can't tell you that that's the road that we're about to go down, but I can tell you that it's a road that we might be about to go down and that we've never, ever been this close in my history of working on this issue since 2006, we've never been this close to using this tool in this way, at this level to reassert Congress Article One war powers.
Hey, I'll check it out.
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Well, now, so it's funny, it seems like maybe they'll be easy.
It'll be easier to pass one about Iran because they're really not trying to get into a war with Iran, whereas in Yemen, they're killing Yemenis all day, five years and counting now.
And it seems like actually the the Saudis and Iranians were starting to work on a peace deal, but then America bombed the general that was delivering the response in that diplomacy.
So I guess we can expect Yemen to get worse.
But well, again, we're on we're on at this moment that you and I are talking about this.
We're on uncharted terrain because the after Trump vetoed the joint resolution, people like, well, OK, that's the end of that road.
And some of us, you know, when we were having that WhatNest conversation said, well, what about doing ConReds?
And other people, you know, what about doing a concurrent resolution?
So we have these different ideas.
Right.
Said, well, what about doing a concurrent resolution?
What about doing a lawsuit?
What about doing impeachment?
And we couldn't get anybody interested in taking up any of those ideas.
But what people were willing to do was the NDA amendments.
OK, but that process has played out now because they were stripped and the NDA was passed without them.
So that's a big change in the world that happened three weeks ago that the NDA process played out.
Now we have this events of the last week with the assassination of Soleimani and the House taking this historic act to pass a concurrent resolution to direct the president to end those unauthorized hostilities.
So that creates an end.
Plus, we just showed in the last week that we can make House Democrats do something by having Ilhan Omar do it.
I mean, that's exactly what just happened.
Ilhan Omar announced on Sunday she's going to do it.
A couple hours later, Nancy Pelosi said me and me and Slotkin are going to do it.
So, you know, in fact, just before you called me, I was chatting with some congressional staffers exactly about this.
You know, we were laughing about how, you know, this is our new strategy for doing stuff.
We're going to have Ilhan Omar do it.
And then Nancy Pelosi said, no, me and Slotkin are going to do it.
And so I said, well, let's do this with ConRES.
Let's do a concurrent resolution to end U.S. participation in the Saudi war in Yemen.
Let's ask Ilhan Omar to do that.
Let's have her announce it.
And then let's see if we can get Pelosi and Slotkin to say they're going to do it instead.
Who knows?
You know, maybe we'll do that next week or the week after.
I don't know.
So we're on, you know, reality is turning a corner.
Just like when Khashoggi was assassinated, you know, and people were moving.
And you couldn't predict exactly what somebody was going to do based on what they did before.
And you have like, you know, suddenly John Brennan is writing an op-ed in The Washington Post denouncing the U.S. relationship with Saudi Arabia.
He was Obama's national security adviser.
He was CIA chief and station chief in Riyadh.
Right.
So you got there's pivoting.
And this week, when Trump assassinated Soleimani, you could see that happening with Democrats, that House leadership Democrats, that they were people who supported Trump's maximum pressure campaign, who supported increasing sanctions on Iran, so on and so forth.
Then this, they were like, holy cow.
And yet, you know, just to show you how contingent this was, after the Iranian response of the missile strike, when, you know, everybody's on pins and needles, then the Iranians retaliate, and then it's not, nobody gets killed and everybody receives relief.
It seems like maybe the Iranians were actually making sure not to hurt anybody because they wanted, you know, to be able to retaliate without escalating.
So when that happened, a lot of people in Washington were like, OK, we got past this.
And then the House leadership didn't want to do the War Powers Resolution anymore.
And Hoyer said, you know, Pelosi announced, we're putting this off to next week.
And Hoyer said, you know, maybe we'll never do this.
And so then there was another fight.
And then the next day they announced that they're going ahead.
So originally, they were going to do it on Wednesday, and they wound up doing it on Thursday.
So I'm trying to share how contingent this is now within the politics of the House Democratic Caucus.
You have people like Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer and Eliot Engel.
That's the leadership.
Steny Hoyer voted for the Iraq War.
Eliot Engel voted for the Iraq War.
Eliot Engel voted against the Iran deal.
But on the other hand, you have an insurgency.
Eliot Engel has a primary, this guy Jamal Bowman.
And so, you know, he's hearing footsteps.
You had, you know, all these actions around the country yesterday with Mubarak.
And then you got the insurgency among the House Democrats themselves, the people like, you know, Ilhan Omar and AOC and Rashida Tlaib, and they've all endorsed Bernie, and so has Ro Khanna.
And Bernie's also doing stuff, and Elizabeth Warren is doing stuff on this, too.
So there is a sense of pressure and insurgency among Democrats that's pushing the House Democratic leadership.
And I watched the whole debate yesterday on C-SPAN, and I'm watching these House Democrats, and I'm like, who are these people?
Who are you?
Champions of, you know, Article One constitutional war powers.
It's so nice to meet you, Nancy Pelosi and Steny Hoyer.
Even Steny Hoyer gave a pretty good speech.
So we're in a moment of flux where it cannot be assumed that just because these people were bad in the past on these issues, they're going to be bad now because they just did something world historical and fast.
You know, within a day, a day after they said, we're postponing this till next week and we might not even do it, a day later, they introduced this resolution with 134 original co-sponsors, including most of the House Democratic leadership and the National Security Committees.
So this is really in flux.
It's really in flux.
And this is by far the world record for original co-sponsors on a war powers resolution.
Dennis Kucinich's resolution in 2011 had two co-sponsors, one Democrat, one Republican.
And when we were first trying to get the Yemen war powers resolution introduced, and I was asking offices, and like there were doors slamming in my face, and the dynamic was, oh, that's that Dennis Kucinich idea.
You know, we don't want to do that.
You, that's radioactive.
That's like, you know, the nuclear option.
That's like impeachment.
And now you've got Nancy Pelosi leading the charge on the Dennis Kucinich thing.
So that's how the world has changed.
I mean, in Washington, you know, we haven't, unfortunately, you know, my hope is that this will lead to changing the world in Yemen.
It hasn't yet, but it's already, I think, having a good effect on the Iran debate by really underscoring that, you know, we've seen the polls, Americans do not want a war with Iran, and even Republicans don't want a war with Iran, and particularly Democrats don't want a war with Iran.
And the House Democratic Caucus is speaking up for that sentiment, which, of course, undercuts any rush to war now, because we're about to have an election.
And Trump doesn't want to run for re-election as the guy who started war with Iran, and the Republicans in Congress don't want to run for election as the people who started war with Iran.
So we're in, this isn't, this is not October 2002, when the Republicans were able to cram the authorization for the use of military force a month before the November congressional elections.
We have a new political dynamic now.
How far we'll be able to take it, you know, remains to be seen.
Well, what do you recommend as far as people getting work done here?
Because not everybody can just move to D.C. and spend all day on the Hill.
Well, that's exactly right.
So one, the situation is in flux, but one thing we can say for sure is that, you know, like stepping back from all this insider stuff, a vote is coming in the Senate.
Probably on a joint resolution sponsored by Tim Kaine and Mike Lee and maybe some other people.
So it's definitely a great time to call your senators and tell them, support the War Powers Resolution to end the war with Iran.
Even if you think your senator is sure to be good, it's still good to call them because the more they hear from people that they care about this, the more that people will do and the more that generates stuff.
So, for example, Tammy Duckworth, I just haven't heard about her because, you know, being from Illinois, she's always she's been a real frustration for peace activists on a lot because she she generally votes the right way at the end, but doesn't lead on her stuff.
She just sent me an email saying that she's supporting the War Powers Resolution in the Senate.
So this is the thing.
And then, of course, other Democrats see that they say, wow, Tammy Duckworth is getting vocal about this.
I better get on the train.
Well, let me let me interrupt just to say, I'm always so cynical about such things, but I know you spent a lot of time doing this and you swear that it's more than marginal.
It really matters that people make those phone calls, huh?
Yes.
I mean, you know, we don't always win.
Right.
Sometimes we mobilize and we lose.
Sometimes we mobilize and we get crushed and we can't always tell in advance which one we're going to be in.
But in this case, we know that there are 47 Democrats in the Senate and that Rand Paul and Mike Lee have already announced that they're going to support the Kaine Resolution.
So that's 49.
So we just need two more.
So it's very close.
And we also know that a majority of senators voted for the Yemen War Powers Resolution.
So there's something like seven to nine Republican senators that are potentially in play, like Daines, Moran, Collins, Murkowski, and Collins has an election.
Some of these people are up for re-election.
So it's quite plausible that this could pass the Senate.
Kaine is working to get people like Todd Young, who's kind of a swing Republican on this stuff, Todd Young of Indiana.
It's quite plausible that this will pass the Senate.
And it's and the more senators, you know, the stronger message, the more especially the more Republican.
And in fact, the precedent has already been set by Matt Goetz in the House.
And of course, as you just mentioned by Rand Paul, that you can have the congressmen who are most closely identified with supporting Trump also be good on this.
And so that ought to create space for the fence sitter guy you just mentioned there and any other Republicans who really want to switch that they can apparently in the framing on this one, they can stay loyal to their leader while also contradicting the hell out of them on a big one.
Right, right.
And part of the pivot that people are doing is saying, you know, many Republicans, I think it's something like 80 percent of Republicans support support of the assassination.
But even a lot of Republicans who supported the assassination are like, but don't do more like we seem to be.
Now we have Pete.
So stop.
Right.
Don't escalate.
And and in particular, people want to know, like, what's the plan?
And Mike Lee came out of that briefing yesterday and he said it was the worst briefing he'd ever seen in nine years in the Senate.
And he was particularly incensed that one of the briefers said, you know, the Senate shouldn't debate this.
And he's like, what are you talking about?
I'm a U.S. senator.
You're telling me that the Senate shouldn't debate it?
Like, you know, as he says, run along, little boys and girls.
So it's absolutely the case that some of these Republicans, even if they are supporters of Trump, even if they supported the assassination, the question now is what happens going forward?
Is the administration going to do more without congressional authorization or do they have to come to Congress, seek an authorization in force, and also just come to Congress and say, what's the plan?
I mean, that's what a lot of members of Congress say, like, what's the play coach?
What's the game plan?
You say you want diplomacy with Iran.
What's the what's the plan to to get there?
And that creates a moment where even Republicans, even Republicans in Congress can pivot and say, no, we need to tell the Trump administration that we need a different course.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I think both sides in America and Iran, they really don't want war, but they sure are at the height of tensions and could stumble into one.
I hate that term.
They could get into one here.
Miscalculations on either side at a period like this could lead to a terrible war.
And so now is a great time for people to get back interested in the antiwar movement and opposing America's foreign policy and getting involved, as you say, at least just pick up the phone and make a phone call on the margin.
It's actually, you know, in terms of bang for your buck, it's something that where you can really have an effect on the way things are.
So it's extremely important stuff there.
And that's it.
We're out of time, but thank you very much, Robert, for again, coming on the show.
All right, you guys, that is Robert Naaman.
He is a foreign policy analyst, independent one now, formerly with Just Foreign Policy.
And you can find him oftentimes working on antiwar issues on Capitol Hill.
The Scott Horton Show, Antiwar Radio, can be heard on KPFK 90.7 FM in L.A., APS Radio dot com, Antiwar dot com, Scott Horton dot org, and Libertarian Institute dot org.
