You’ve probably heard the refrain on Congress and war powers, presented perennially as a cure-all for toxic conflicts ever since the Vietnam era. The last time our government formally declared war was in 1942, and since then the legislative branch has acted like a feckless “bystander” to wars initiated by the executive, and must now “reclaim,” “reassert,” or “take back” its war powers from the increasingly “unlimited authority” of the “imperial” president. It’s in the Constitution: only Congress, per Article I, Section 8, has the power to declare war.
This argument typically gives the impression that, if only proper procedure were followed, the United States would have avoided any number of disastrous entanglements—Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Yemen, and more. The problem is that it’s not borne out by historical evidence.
Contrary to Beltway commentariat consensus, American bellicosity is not merely the result of uncontrolled executive branch war-making. Often forgotten is the fact that Congress has mostly supported the United States’ wars, usually with great enthusiasm. Legislators have the constitutional authority to stop and deliberate the president’s wars, but have historically been unwilling to exercise it.
The proceduralist narrative falsely assumes that Congress has “given up” its war powers. Although it’s true that Congress hasn’t officially declared war since 1942, the body has passed statutory authorizations for military operations in Lebanon in 1958 (72-19 in the Senate) and 1983 (54-46), Vietnam in 1964 (88-2), Iraq in 1991 (52-47) and 2003 (77-23), and Afghanistan in 2001 (98-0). The absence of authorizations for other military operations—the bombing campaigns in Bosnia in 1995, Kosovo in 1999, Iraq throughout much of the 1990s, and Libya in 2011, to cite a few examples—is more plausibly read not as criticism of the president’s position, but rather a desire to preemptively weasel out of responsibility if a war went badly or of a belief that a military operation didn’t require congressional authorization. Declarations of war, in that precise language, have all but disappeared, most likely because the proliferation of international laws of war in the twentieth century has made states more hesitant to call their wars “wars” to avoid unequivocally triggering application of these increasingly restrictive laws, as University of Minnesota political scientist Tanisha Fazal argued in her recent book, Wars of Law.